Tonight is an unusually slow night at work, so I decided to close my eyes and put my feet up. But because I very rarely do this, I didn’t allow myself to fall all the way asleep, but “brought” myself back to waking when I felt myself slipping completely “down”.
When I did this, it would cause a “flutter” in my chest and I’d come back “up”, and start over.
Have y’all ever done this and is it it harmful?
Thanks
Q
Of course it’s harmful … didn’t you learn ANYTHING from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”? Jeez! 
If REM sleep is your most restful stage of sleep, then you might cause yourself a feeling of sleep deprivation or having slept poorly. However, seeing as you’re doing this at work, and not on a regular basis and not as part of your normal sleeping habits, I don’t see how this could harm you.
It’s just like keeping yourself from nodding off in class, right? And we’ve never heard of any college students developing any not-quite-sleeping in class ailments other than accidentally banging their heads against their desks, right? So relax-- you’re totally safe.
Don’t know what that chest fluttering’s about, though.
Avoiding REM sleep is very harmful in the long term. This has actually been studied but I don’t have time right now for cites.
Basically some researchers had people get a full 8 hours of sleep a night but interrupted their sleep everytime they detected the subject going into REM sleep. Over the course of several days the subjects became extremely lethargic and haggard and physically looked as if they hadn’t gotten any sleep in days.
Obviously the researchers didn’t push the subjects too far but you could extrapolate the findings to assume that these people were headed downhill into psychosis or just generally non-functioning people.
**
On a related note, if you deprive yourself (or are deprived of) REM sleep, your body makes up for it at a later date with more REM than usual.
(No cite, other than “that program last night on the Discovery channel” etc.).