The Non-REM State Of Sleep

Dreaming may be a little more complex than you thought. It’s not just unicorns and rainbows that play in your head while you are asleep. What occurs in your dreams is based on different experiences, and disabilities that you may have. To know about the different types of dreams and what causes them you must first know the generics of dreams. Everyone dreams, some people just don’t remember any of their dreams. (Nichols 1) Dreaming occurs 3-6 times every night and each dream lasts about 5-20 minutes. When dreamers are asleep they follow a ninety minute cycle, there are 5 stages of this cycle, two stages of light sleep, two stages of deep sleep, and one stage of rapid eye movement or REM. (Young 1) While dreaming your brain goes through recent memories and sorts them out, dreaming is not a necessity to your brain sorting through memories but it does help your brain (Young 1). This means that your brain is thinking about memories, and thoughts, and observations all at once while they are being sorted out and stored for later. …show more content…
Dreams can also occur in the non-REM state of sleep, but it is rare. Non-REM dreams are just as they sound, dreams that occur outside of the REM state of sleep. Non-REM dreams are more of your brain’s thoughts than actual dreams (Young 1). Some memories show up in our dreams a week after they happened, this is called the dream-lag effect (Nichols 1). Lucid dreams don’t happen a lot but they are still important dreams. When you have a lucid you usually can tell that you are in a dream and can control what is happening, this is caused by an abnormal amount of brain activity while you are asleep. (Breus