Sleep and Dreams
Sleep
When we first fall asleep.
First house is the deepest
period of sleep.
Blood pressure, heart rate
and breathing fall
REM Sleep
Brain begins to fire furiously
Blood pressure zooms up
Eyes move rapidly from side to side
and up and down
Breathing and heart rate are very
rapid
The body is paralyzed
This happens every night, four or five times!
REM Sleep
Rapid Eye Movement
Dogs and cats have this after
about 30 minutes after falling
asleep and it is easy to see
them.
You can see the eyeball rolling
in the socket
Humans have REM about 90
minutes from falling asleep
and happens every 90 min until
morning.
REM Sleep
Dreams happen
during REM
Dreams last
between 5 to 40
minutes
Each REM cycle
lasts longer than
the previous per
night.
Sleep Cycle
Stage 1 – relaxed – Alpha Brain Waves
Stage 2 – Twilight Stage – alpha waves go away
Stage 3 – Drift into deeper sleep – beginning
delta waves
Stage 4 – Deepest Sleep – Delta Waves – it is
now about 1 hour into your sleep.
Now you go in reverse back to stage 1….
The Sleep Cycle
Before the second hour, you will arrive
back at stage 1 but you go into REM sleep.
This is when your first dream of the night
will happen. (you don’t actually enter the
real stage 1, relaxed, until you wake up in
the morning.
For the rest of the night you go from Stage
1 REM to Stage 4 and back again.
Your last dream towards the morning will
be close to 30 minutes long and you will be
more likely to remember that dream than
the earlier ones.
NREM Sleep
Non-rapid eye movement
Where Is my
chocolate bunny?
Why am I wearing a
dress? Is my name
molly? I am a ninja.
Night terrors
Sleepwalking and talking in sleep
Less essential part of sleep
If you are not in REM you are in NREM
Vague, partial images and stories, doesn’t
make sense.
The body may be resting (?)
For teens, this is when growth hormone is
secreted, this is why teens need more sleep
than adults!
3 Hypotheses about
why we dream…
1. Dreams are used to get the brain reorganized
after a day of work
2. Dreams are used to help work out unsolved
problems left over from the day
3. Dreams result from electrical realignments,
revising and updating going on in the brain.
The brain is trying to make sense of all the
information, so it makes up a “story”
(dream) to fit them.
Psychology of Dreams
Do you remember what psychologist analyzed
dreams to find clues to his patients inner thoughts?
Sigmund Freud
He believed dreams were symbolic expression sof our
unconscious conflicts
For Example: If we dream of a fortress, this may really
represent a strong-willed father. If we are trying to
knock down the fortress in our dreams, then maybe
things are not going so well with Dad!
Nightmares
Night Terrors
Infrequent
More vivid and real
REM
During NREM
Because the body isn’t
prepared it goes into
physical overload,
breathing rate increases,
the person feels chocked,
heart rate extremely high
Causes panic and fear of
dying.
Sweeting, nausea,