I remember an episode of Star Trek TNG where there was something onboard the ship which caused the crew to not get any REM sleep. They started seeing things and acting crazy, like talking to people who weren’t there. Would you really snap like that if you didn’t get any REM sleep, specifically?
I just went in for another sleep study and the results showed that I skipped all REM sleep that night until they fitted me for a CPAP machine. The 80 page report that the study generated strongly suggests that I got little to no REM sleep for some unknown period of time. Now, I am no model for sanity but it didn’t cause hallucinations.
However, I used to stay up for days at a time in college and often during one period a few years ago. That did cause some severe hallucinations. About 80 hours awake and functional was my record but things went rapidly downhill quickly. I was even thoroughly convinced that I was fighting in Vietnam once (I am only 33) and dug a trench in my apartment backyard to hunker down in during the middle of the night. I somehow moved my position about 3 miles into an a place I had never been to later (I like to assume my strategy was sound because I didn’t get killed). I came to early the next day covered in camouflaging mud and dirt with special attention paid under the eyes. Absolutely no drugs were involved. Lack of sleep can deffinetly jeopardize your sanity.
Yes you will
No you won’t. Current research indicates that depriving someone of REM sleep (but not of delta sleep) will not affect them outwardly.
However, once you stop depriving them of REM, they will do much more REM than before the deprivation, as if they’re compensating for the lack. Why are they compensating? What is the actual function of REM, versus delta sleep? No clue. It’s currently under intensive research.
REM sleep may be involved in memory consolidation.
Replay of motor memories (a.k.a procedural) in several species has been shown during REM sleep, and it is thought by some that memory consolidation and/or relocation may occur during this time as well. Depending on your definition of insanity, I would venture to say that the answer to your question is a definitive yes. You simply would not be the functioning human being you are today had you never gotten REM sleep. It exists because it serves some critical evolutionary benefit. Keep in mind that during sleep we are highly vulnerable to predators, so the payoff must be quite large.
I thought I would also mention that I am aware of the research Crescend mentions, but disagree with his conclusions. REM is critical to your long term health, well being, and indeed, sanity.
Could you elaborate on this? I don’t know that much about this topic, but what I had presented to me in class stated that there seems to be no immediate or near-term detriment to being deprived of REM sleep. I agree with you that certainly, something is happening during REM, but are there any studies regarding long-term REM (and only REM) deprivation?
I have sleep apnea. Before I got my C-PAP I would go weeks without REM sleep (when they did the sleep study, I woke up 190 times in 180 minutes). I would hallucinate…I’d hear voices that weren’t there and see faint “phantom” people.
The night they tried the C-PAP machine on me, I went into immediate REM sleep and stayed there for the rest of the night. No cycling at all.
So how can you tell if you’re having REM sleep? Is dreaming characteristic of non-REM sleep? I’m somewhat apneic, and it seems that no matter what time I’m woken up (and I’m woken a fair amount, courtesy of the three-year-old), I’m in the middle of a dream.
When you have a sleep study, they put a gazillion electrodes all over your body and measure everything they can during the study. One of the graphs they capture is the cycle of sleep you are going through at every second over the 8 hours or so. They showed no REM for me which was assumed to be my typical pattern because I stopped breathing about once every minute and that prevented it from happening.
I don’t think you could know on your own.
Typically, REM sleep is the hardest sleep-state to be woken up from by an external stimulus, but, paradoxically, the easiest to wake up from yourself. External sensory inputs are shut off during REM, skeletal-muscle control outputs are shut off, and you’re off in your own little world for the duration of the cycle.
My dreams always wake me up, or I wake up at the end of them. Is that normal?
I don’t know. If this is impinging on your quality of life, you should see your doctor. Which I am not. A doctor, or your doctor. Yet. 
Kind of like defragmenting your hard drive?
I have no cites to back it up, but I would guess that you seem to wake up in the middle of a dream because your memory/brain has skipped the time between dreams…But that’s just a guess.
Sorta. More like maintaining a database; removing redundancies, compressing records, reorganizing indices, that sort of thing.
Back in the early 1980’s I read a brief article in the local newspaper about an Israeli man who didn’t dream. It was discovered that he had been wounded in combat while serving in the armed forces and had a tiny piece of shrapnel in his locus ceruleus. The researchers who evaluated him said that he appeared to suffer no ill effects from his inability to dream.