dreaming sleep

When the researchers interviewed the patients, however, they found that three in five lupus patients and one in three with other rheumatology-related conditions reported increasingly disrupted dreaming sleep -- usually vivid and distressing nightmares -- just before their hallucinations.

He meets scientists and physicians specializing in sleep disorders, and draws on historical accounts to eloquently describe conditions such as sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, sleep apnoea and insomnia.

“During dreaming sleep, the body is paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Occasionally the body gets confused and the brain wakes yet the paralysis persists,” Williams said.

While tiredness causes slip-ups at work, the right kind of rest is also crucial: learning is consolidated during dreaming sleep, when the body is taken ‘offline’ and the brain can run through what it has done that day.

But, it turned out, over 40 percent of my night was spent in REM sleep — or “dreaming sleep,” which normally occurs only intermittently throughout the night — while just 5 percent was spent in delta sleep, the rejuvenating kind.