STAGES OF SLEEP
Sleep is divided into two categories:
REM and non-REM sleep. You begin the night in non-REM sleep followed by a brief period of REM sleep. The cycle continues throughout the night about every 90 Minutes…
Stage 1 / N1
Stage 1 is essentially the “dozing off” stage, and it normally lasts just one to five minutes.
During N1 sleep, the body hasn’t fully relaxed, though the body and brain activities start to slow with periods of brief movements (twitches). There are light changes in brain activity associated with falling asleep in this stage.
It’s easy to wake someone up during this sleep stage, but if a person isn’t disturbed, they can move quickly into stage 2. As the night unfolds, an uninterrupted sleeper may not spend much more time in stage 1 as they move through further sleep cycles.
Stage 2 / N2
During stage 2, the body enters a more subdued state including a drop in temperature, relaxed muscles, and slowed breathing and heart rate. At the same time, brain waves show a new pattern and eye movement stops. On the whole, brain activity slows, but there are short bursts of activity5 that actually help resist being woken up by external stimuli.
Stage 2 sleep can last for 10-25 minutes during the first sleep cycle, and each N2 stage can become longer during the night. Collectively, a person typically spends about half their sleep time in N2 sleep.
Stage 3 / N3
Stage 3 sleep is also known as deep sleep, and it is harder to wake someone up if they are in this phase. Muscle tone, pulse, and breathing rate decrease in N3 sleep as the body relaxes even further.
The brain activity during this period has an identifiable pattern of what are known as delta waves. For this reason, stage 3 may also be called delta sleep or slow-wave sleep (SWS).
Experts believe that this stage is critical to restorative sleep, allowing for bodily recovery and growth. It may also bolster the immune system and other key bodily processes. Even though brain activity is reduced, there is evidence that deep sleep contributes to insightful thinking6, creativity7, and memory.
We spend the most time in deep sleep during the first half of the night. During the early sleep cycles, N3 stages commonly last for 20-40 minutes. As you continue sleeping, these stages get shorter, and more time gets spent in REM sleep instead.
REM Sleep
During REM sleep, brain activity picks up, nearing levels seen when you’re awake. At the same time, the body experiences atonia, which is a temporary paralysis of the muscles, with two exceptions: the eyes and the muscles that control breathing. Even though the eyes are closed, they can be seen moving quickly, which is how this stage gets its name.
REM sleep is believed to be essential to cognitive functions like memory, learning, and creativity. REM sleep is known for the most vivid dreams, which is explained by the significant uptick in brain activity. Dreams can occur in any sleep stage, but they are less common and intense in the NREM periods.
Under normal circumstances, you don’t enter a REM sleep stage until you’ve been asleep for about 90 minutes. As the night goes on, REM stages get longer, especially in the second half of the night. While the first REM stage may last only a few minutes, later stages can last for around an hour. In total, REM stages make up around 25% of sleep in adults.
WHAT ARE DREAMS? WHAT WE ACTUALLY SAW IN DREAMS?
I think when we sleep, we see different kinds of things. It is not just one thing. Dreams are just a name for it. But in fact, we experience multiple things in our dreams. Bad visions we called nightmares. So it is just a name. There are some types of visions I thought we see in our dreams are as below -
1. PAST LIFE
Very first thing I started to notice was what if we recall our past life memories in our dreams. I believe that this actually happens. For instance, you may have died because of drowning, because of falling from height, or maybe because of fire, then you will have fear or phobia in the present life from that same thing like going underwater, fire or height. And I am afraid of heights and deep water for that matter. It is because some part of our consciousness gets stuck with our soul / energy when we die and when that energy enters into a new body, it makes our brain recall those past life incidents in our dreams, because in sleep, our brain disconnects with the present life and explores its own data / memory. I fear of heights though but I also wish if I could fly like birds or superman, my fantasy, so I have seen myself flying in my dream many times but suddenly I am now falling and fearing what will happen now, feeling it in my gut, the fear, and everytime when I am about to hit the ground, I wake up.
2. PARALLEL UNIVERSES
However, what if some of our dreams can actually be reality, happening in a parallel universe then and there? Can some of our dreams be in fact glimpses of events taking place in an alternate reality, a parallel universe?
A thousand of years ago, mystics believed that dreams are what happens in a parallel universe is in fact a place resided by ghosts and spirits - however, while scientists have rubbished the ghosts and spirits theory, they have in fact agreed that they might be a multiverse - the existence of many more universes other than our own. Though it has not been proven yet, but its existence cannot be completely refused either.
Scientists think that there could be a copy of all of us in the parallel world - someone who is like you in any aspects. The life of this person (he might or might not be human like) is identical to yours - however, they might do certain things differently.
People often have a dream of a place that they never have visited. What if I told you that such places actually do exist and are currently being visited by someone else, who is identical to you, but is still not the same?
Also, a lot of people see things in dreams that are about to happen. Also we all have had déjà vu once or the other in our lives - we feel that we have been in this situation before with the same circle of people or without people. Often, we brush this off as coincidence, however, there could be a deeper meaning to it, in the sense that your copy in the parallel world might have experienced the same situation actually, and you are only feeling it, thinking that this has happened to you before, which is not.
So, I think there are chances that what we experience in dreams are actually a glimpse of our another version from a parallel universe, a copy of our world. I heard or read somewhere that every decision of ours creates a new possibility, an alternate reality. We have two options. The one we choose become our reality, and the other option that we dropped, creates an alternate reality, an another universe, parallel. How? What if we chose second option. Might thing be different for us? So, many decisions, many universes, multiverse actually. Our brain connects somehow to the another reality and we start experiencing the another really of our other version, which we think that its us, but again, its not us.
3. ASTRAL PROJECTION
Another explanation of dreams I could think of was Astral projection, out-of-body experience. Also, sometimes it happened with me that when I go to sleep and just close my eyes, I fall asleep and start dreaming within a minute. I saw same room, same situation, same light or darkness in my room, I mean the exact same thing I saw before sleeping, and then suddenly I wake up. My God, you cannot believe I could tell the difference if it was a dream or was I awake this whole time. I think we cannot rule out astral projection explanation as well.
4. OUR DAILY LIFE OR THOUGHT BEFORE SLEEP
This is a very common explanation which I think everybody might know. Our daily life problems, happiness, everything we do the whole day, the things we keep thinking about all the time, what were we thinking about before we went to sleep, I think it also manifests in our dreams.
5. RANDOM
The last explanation of dreams is that sometimes they can be random too. I mean it's our brain, you don’t know how it works. It might show us random images and videos sometimes.
