Thread: rem cycle

Probably, there are brief awakenings after each REM period but most people are oblivious to it. I've noticed since I started practicing LDing I wake a lot more frequently after dreams in the middle of the night. Also, if I repeat mantras before going to sleep telling myself to wake up after my dreams I can usually wake after each REM period.

This chart may help you out: http://www.dreammoods.com/images/sleepcycle.gif

I wake up around that time a lot as well when I start to sleep around 11PM-Midnight.

I normally set my alarm to wake me up around 3:45 AM sometimes, or even 4 AM occasionally, and I usually end up waking up naturally before the alarm starts. NON-REM stages are usually finished after a few hours of sleep (the minimum on average is around 3.5 hours of sleep if you wanted to do a decent WBTB+WILD attempt I believe).

NON-REM and REM alternate around as you sleep at night, and REM starts to get more apparent and longer, and usually before you start to hit the first set of REM periods, or even when you interrupt the process of going into a REM period, you wake up. We wake up several times naturally, most of them we aren't cognizant of at the time.

So depending on how long you slept, if it was below 4 hours of sleep, it was most likely waking up from NON-REM, if it was more than that, you probably just started to hit REM.

This is excluding other factors such as REM rebound, where you would hit REM much quicker to compensate for the lack of sleep.

If I went to sleep around 11-12, when would be the best time to set my alarm to wake me up if I wanted to do a WBTB?

It depends, that's something you have to figure out yourself, but since you said you wake up around 3-4 AM, if you start sleeping around 11 PM (and I mean not starting to go to bed, I mean actual deep sleeping) , it would be 4 hours of sleep if you woke up around 3AM and so on.

For me, I'm trying to get used to the 4 hours of sleep, but I do admit that I'm having trouble trying to sleep around 11 PM because sometimes I want to sleep earlier.

But you could try setting the alarm a few minutes after (10-15 minutes, but you can work around that if you want) the time you normally wake up (so around 3:10-3:15 AM if you want a starting point) since you'll most likely wake up before the set time anyway (just make sure to turn it off when you do).

For a WBTB, I usually try to stay up for 20 minutes or so, doing things like typing up the dreams I remember on my laptop (though even though it's a bad idea to have a glaring screen at night, I still manage to sleep pretty quick anyway).

Problem is, I still haven't gotten used to staying aware for a while for spending 20 minutes in the WBTB time interval. I remember one time I stayed awake for around 90-100 minutes, and I was able to enter a WILD after a few rolling over to certain sides on my bed.

The point I'm making from this is that it just depends, and you should experiment to see where you can hit the "sweet spot" of hopefully interrupting a REM cycle, because ideally, that would mean that you enter the REM phase much quicker because you disrupt the flow of it when you woke up.

And with WBTBs, those are another thing you have to experiment with. There are several guides on WILDing such as:

http://www.dreamviews.org/f79/mancon...-guide-119446/

Basically, he mentions for WBTBs on how you can find the ideal point to know when to sleep back from waking up. When you find the point where you feel you can easily fall asleep, but at the same time, not being able to lose consciousness/awareness quickly is what you should be aiming for.

He also mentions parts of breathing, which I believe a useful variant or anchor for entering the dream phase to retain a small awareness as you're falling asleep.

okey thanks

Every sleep cycle (non-REM + REM) is about 90 min. long. So you can set your alarm at multiples of 90 minutes, starting after 4.5 hours of sleep. That's the most likely time of you being in REM stage.
So that would be 4.5, 6, 7.5 hours after falling asleep. Or you can wake up naturally, as many do. Drink some water everytime you wake up to ensure it wakes you up again later.

I sleep about 11, so I'll set my alarm for 3:30.