The “Normal” Sleep Cycle
“Early to bed and early to rise,” Ben Franklin admonished us,
attributing a practical benefit if not moral superiority to the early
start. But there is probably no “normal” sleep pattern or “right”
time for waking up and going to bed. Folks have very different
“natural” cycles; some are simply more alert late at night and have
a terrible time trying to fight their way out of deep sleep when the
alarm clock rips the morning.
Getting up at dawn may do the early bird a lot of good, but it’s
not so good for the worm.
Sleep itself is not a single, clearly defined condition. Sleep
is actually a series of five stages of progressively deeper sleep,
including the REM/dream stage. Most people will cycle through
the five stages three or four times during an eight-hour snooze.
The dream stages tend to get progressively longer during the night,
and dreams will sometimes continue from episode to episode.
Lots of books purport to interpret your dreams for you, but
no one has satisfactorily explained how you can have a dream
that you can’t understand. (The “right side” of the brain shows its
murky, symbolic films, sans subtitles, to the literal-minded “left
side” of the brain?)
Some claim to be able to see future events in their dreams,
and most of us certainly revisit—and often reshape—the past in
dreams. Others claim to be able to teach you the techniques for
lucid dreaming (conscious awareness of the dream state and the
ability to change the “plot line”).
... and the things that Go Wrong in the Night
- Insomnia is by far the most well known and common
disorder preventing you from getting your sleep, so com-
mon, in fact, that most of us will suffer from it at one
time or another.
A R E Y O U G E T T I N G E N O U G H S L E E P?