During the week I usually get about 5 hours of sleep, 10 hours a night on the weekends. Every once in a while though I’ll REALLY saw some wood on the order of 12-14 (sometimes more) hours.
One thing that I’ve notice on my Rip VanWinkle nights is that as the night progresses my dreams become more and more distressing. In fact, even though I could use maybe a little more sleep I’ll just get up since I don’t want to deal with them any more.
Any idea why? Is my brain just dredging up stuff to fill the “dead air” (between my ears) or is it stuff that would normal have been dealt with in smaller doses in hours 6-8 during the week?
Thanks!
I have personally noted (quite strongly, for over 30 years) that the final dreams that come late in a longer than 8 hour sleep are more evocative (and more directly traceable to one’s immediate concerns) than most. Sir Francis Crick, of DNA fame, had some interesting theories (in 1981, when he recounted them to me) about the content of late sleep dreams, and actually avoided them by minimizing the duration his sleep in the belief that one simply isn’t as creative if on “completely cleans house every night.” He believed a certain amount of ‘leftover garbage’ -specifically the last dreams, which were most germane to his most recent conscious thoughts- enhanced the random associations we call ‘creativity’.
I am unaware of any formal scientific studies that support his beliefs. Yet I am sorry that your late dreams are unpleasant. I’ve had times in my life when that was true, and they were no good times in my life
I don’t want to be rude but can I piggyback a question about bad dreams here? I wondered if dehydration (from being sick or whatever) causes bad dreams.
It’s already known that a person will go through several REM stages (when dreaming occurs) per night.
However, a person will usually only remember the dream they wake out of. They have no recollection of what they were dreaming all those other REM times.
As you sleep longer, you don’t need as much REM sleep, or, for that matter, more sleep. Your body has had a lot of sleep replenishment and is starting to be more and more awake, and in lighter and light stages of sleep.
And so, once you’ve passed hour 9 in sleep, you’re easily awakened.
If you’re having a good dream and you wake up, you roll over to go back to sleep to enjoy it. Thus, you can wind up forgetting about this good dream.
If you have a bad dream and you wake up (easier to do if it excites you), you tend not to go back to sleep with that dream fresh in your mind, and so you finally get out of bed.
This tends to make it seem like you’re having more bad dreams than you are.
The longer you sleep the more time you spend in REM phase of sleep - a much lighter stage of sleep. In this light phase of sleep its very easy to incorporate your “awake thoughts” into your dreams. If you’re stressing over a situation there’s a good chance these emotions will occur in a following dream.
Taken in a completely different direction, this is an excellent state in which to induce lucid dreaming: You can enter a dream directly from a waking state with the appropriate thought queues and obtain lucidity quite easily.
I worked the overnight shift for 10 years and I had the opposite effect. When I slept 4 or 5 hours I would dream vividly and hear things. Then I would zonk out for 24 hours. Had great sleep. I reckoned the ‘audio hullicinations’ and the vivid drems were due to the fact I was waking up and remembering my dreams.
For a while I worked two jobs so on Fridays I got no sleep and slept pretty much all day Sunday.