Thread: How to wake up in time for a REM period?

Really? No one has anything to contribute?

Question - why do you want to wake up before a REM cycle starts? If you want to remember your dream, what you do is wake up at the very end of REM while you are still in it.

The first cycle starts about 1.5 hours into sleep, so if you want to wake up before that, set your alarm for 1.5 hours + however long it takes you to get to sleep.

I thought that dreams were had in the REM period of the cycle, so if we woke up just before the REM began after the nonREM period and do a WBTB, we would enter the REM cycle with the WBTB effects?

Sounds like b12 is talking about a DEILD technique, though I've never heard of doing one for the 1st REM period... usually it's recommended to wait 4.5 hours to hit a later, longer REM period after already getting plenty of deep sleep.

I'd say go for 4.5 hours - if you wake from a dream remembering it, then try DEILD - if not then do a WBTB and try for WILD.

Right... so if I wake up without any dreams, then I have woken up before the REM period takes place at the end of the nonREM, so I do WBTB..
And If I did remember some dreams, it means I woke up after the complete REM cycle finished, so I do DEILD to ... go straight back into one? But that doesn't make sense.

Could you explain how the REM periods work, what times they happen at and what methods are best at what times?
I feel this is the information I'm missing and it's what is screwing with me and making me fail.

Ok, this is stritly from memory, and I don;t think it's really an exact science anyway -

Supposedly REM begins every 90 minutes (hour and a half). So the 1st one should be an hour and a half after you get to sleep.

Next one is 3 hours in, and is longer than the last (each REM period gets longer).

Then 4.5 hours

then 6 hours.


But I"m not sure if it's supposed to be measured from the beginning or the end of the last REM. Also, I've heard people say they sometimes start having REM dreams right after falling asleep - could be due to sleep deprivation and REM rebound, or I don't know? So as I say, it's definitely not an exact science, just use the numbers as guidelines.

It seems if you wake from REM it's pretty easy to go right back into it, and to fall asleep very quickly.

What I heard was-
You fall asleep and after 90 mins, you start the REM cycle.
This is basically an hour of nothing (I'm only concerned about dream time), then half an hour of REM, which gets longer and longer after each cycle.
You normally wake up after each full period during the night.

The thing is, if you wake up after a REM cycle finished, then you just woke up after a dreaming phase ended. Then the WBTB postpones the next REM cycle until you fall asleep, and so the effects of the WBTB are lost while waiting the hour until the next REM begins.

I was asking how to wake up before those REM periods started, be it in the middle of the nonREM cycle or just near the end.

In theory, the time you spend awake in your WBTB will replace the NREM stages of sleep, so when you return to sleep, you will be just in time for the next REM cycle. Postponing your WBTB to later in the night / early morning will also decrease the time between REM cycles.

In reality, it is a little more complicated, but this is the general idea.

Originally Posted by Origami

What I heard was-
You fall asleep and after 90 mins, you start the REM cycle.
This is basically an hour of nothing

Do you mean an hour and a half?

Originally Posted by Origami

The thing is, if you wake up after a REM cycle finished, then you just woke up after a dreaming phase ended. Then the WBTB postpones the next REM cycle until you fall asleep, and so the effects of the WBTB are lost while waiting the hour until the next REM begins.

As I understand it, the REM cycle continues even when you're awake (for a few hours.. of course it re-sets when you've been awake for several hours). This is why naps can work so well. So, if you wake at the end of a REM period after about 4.5 hours, it's only going to be a little while to the next one starts, and staying awake thinking about lucid dreaming and working on some technique fills that time so you can then slip right into the next REM period. At least that's my understanding.

Oh, so when I stay up for about 10-15 mins in my WBTBs, I should really be staying up for an hour?

There is no way to just cut that part out and wake up just in time?

Ah! Beat to the punch by Robot_Butler!

@Darkmatters- 90mins- hour of nothing, but 30 minutes of REM I read somewhere. My maths isn't that bad!

I think a WBTB should probably be longer than 10 - 15 minutes. Though in my case, if I start trying to get back to sleep in about 10 - 15 minutes, it will probably take me another half hour or so to fall back asleep anyway...

Originally Posted by Origami

@Darkmatters- 90mins- hour of nothing, but 30 minutes of REM I read somewhere. My maths isn't that bad!

Where did you read that? I've always read it's 90 minutes till the beginning of the 1st REM, not the end of it.

Well, same here. It usually takes me a long time to get back to sleep, so staying up for too long isn't a good idea. I'm not sure whether I stay up for too long or not enough, it's hard to judge.

But every time I stay up for about 15mins, it never works. So maybe tonight.... 30 minutes?

The timing depends on how late in the night it is, and experience. Try changing the amount of time until you find out what works best for you. For example, if it is very late in the night, your REM cycles may be only 30 minutes apart. They get closer together as the night progresses.

Also keep in mind the amount of time it normally takes you to fall back to sleep, and your own routine. Some people like lying in bed for 30-45 minutes meditating and preparing themselves for the dream. Other people like to time it so they jump right into a dream. If you are just starting out, or do not have much experience with meditation, I would suggest timing it so you return to bed and immediately enter a REM cycle.

Right... I'm going to need some help figuring this out then.

I went to sleep at around 1am. I'm pretty sure it was then.
I then woke up naturally at 4am, like I usually do, and I got up and walked around, read my DJ for half an hour. I then went back to bed, and fell asleep at around 5am.
In the dreams that followed, there was one where I was blasting up through some blue stars, like in a rocket ship. The strange thing though was that through the whole of that dream, I felt like I was in S.P. When I tried to fight of the S.P., it got much stronger, the vibrations were incredible.

Then afterwards I had two dreams that took place in my bedroom, but neither had me think I had woken up though. Not sure if this really means anything.

How can I fine tune it from here to maximize my efforts? I usually take half an hour to fall asleep after a WBTB.

I usually find out my REM patterns by experimenting with alarms ranging from 5:30 AM to 7:00 AM (I have a flexible schedule ) and see which alarm wakes me up the QUICKEST. This usually is in the MIDDLE of the REM cycle. I'm aiming for that because it is easy to do a DEILD mid-REM.

Well I'm fairly certain from last night when my 3rd REM cycle starts. I went to sleep at around midnight, and I woke up at 4am. Since REM cycles are 90 mins each, thats 2 cycles, and then I WBTB'd through the 3rd one. Last night when I go to sleep at around 5am, I think I was right on top of the REM period. This may not add up with the numbers, but know that falling asleep at 12 was only a guess, it may have been later.

Ok, so let me see if I have gotten this straight-

Everytime we wake up in the night, we wake up after a full REM cycle has occurred. That's from stage 1-5, and REM sleep. So if it is very early in the night, like 1am, we can safely assume that the next REM period will be in about an hour. Then that REM period lasts for a short while, maybe up to half an hour. As the night goes on, the nonREM sleep periods get shorter, and the REM periods longer.

So if we fall asleep at midnight, we nonREM for an hour, and REM for maybe 30mins.
It's now 1:30am, another hour long nonREM, and then 30 mins of REM. It's now 3am.
After that, it's maybe 50mins of nonREM, but 40mins of REM say, so it's still 90mins, and now 4:30.

Everytime we wake up, it's just after a REM finished. So if we can work out how long the nonREMs last at that time of night, we can adjust our WBTB's.

Is this right?

Or, TL;DR

We sleep for an hour in between REM cycles. Maybe 50 mins or 70mins, but around an hour. Only the REM lengthens over time. So, you can work out when your next REM is due if you know the time you woke up and fell asleep. The latter is obviously the hardest.

Say you fell asleep at midnight, and you woke up, it's now 4am. That's four hours of sleep. Since each hour of NonREM has 15mins/20mins/30mins/40mins of REM on each end (estimate), you can assume you went through-

12:00-1:15 cycle
1:15-2:20 cycle
2:20-3:50 cycle
This means you went through 3 cycles of REM, give or take 10 mins, and you know how long your next REM will be, and that it's an hour or so until then.

I used those times as an example because that's what happened to me last night. I woke up at 4, did a half hour WBTB then it took me about half an hour to fall back asleep again. During that extra long WBTB, I went through the nonREM cycle, and fell asleep pretty much into the 40min REM.