Essay On REM Sleep

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Dreams Occur Only During REM Sleep
Many individuals believe that you can only experiences dreams during the REM stage of sleep. The REM stage is one of five stages that people pass through when they go to sleep ever night. REM is an acronym that stands for rapid eye movement. The REM stage was discovered by the two scientists, Kleitman and Aserinsky (Suzuki et al., 2004). During their research they observed that when their patients were woken up during the REM phase, they were capable of recalling their dreams most vividly. Since then the REM has always been associated with dreaming. During REM sleep, dreams tend to be longer, more bizarre, and more complex. However, this is not the only stage of sleep in which people dream. In fact there are multiple stages of sleep in which a person can dream (Behn, Ananthasubramaniam, & Booth, 2013).
In order to better understand how this myth originated, the original research by Kleitman and Aserinsky must be looked at in further detail. After discovering the human rapid eye movement sleep stage (REM), they documented that dreams were obtained most frequently when the patients were woken up from the REM sleep (Suzuki et al., 2004). Many scientists began conducting studies on REM sleep and dreams. They found a strong connection between an electrophysiologic phenomena and participants experience during REM sleep. Electrophysiologic phenomena is defined as, “the electrical properties, characteristics of living organisms, and the processes of organisms or their parts that are involved in generating and responding to electrical charges” (Brown, 2010). This means that during REM sleep, our brains is experiencing high activity. This explains why the REM stage is associated with longer, more complex...

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...g the REM stage. Non-REM dreams are similar to thinking about something briefly during the day, whereas REM dreams are more comparable to thinking intensely about something. The duration in which you are in the stages differ as well. The REM stage last of about two hours a night. Non-REM last for about four to six hours. The intense dreams experienced during the REM sleep is a result of heightened brain activity (Hartman & Zimberoff, 2012).
The quality of sleep we get during the REM stage and non-REM stage differ greatly. Therefore, it seems only logical that the way we dream would differ as well. We dream more intensely and vividly during REM sleep but that doesn’t mean that we don’t dream in non-REM sleep. It just simply means that we dream differently. Even if we dream in a less intense way during Non-REM sleep, we are still capable of dreaming during this stage

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