Does setting your alarm to multiple times during the night suppress dreams?

[SuperFob]

Before I begin, let me point out how amusing I find it that I'm actually starting to use this site more to get rid of my dreams than to enhance them. For several months, maybe even longer than that, I've had the habit of setting my alarms to multiple times during the night. I have one at 5 AM, which is when I wake up, and also ones at 3, 4, and sometimes even 2 AM. I can't remember if I had dreams or not before doing this, but I'm pretty sure I haven't been having many dreams while I was doing this because I would wake up every morning with little to no memory of having had any dreams over the course of the night. I decided to stop doing this a few days ago, however, and only set one alarm to 5 AM. For the three or four nights I've slept with only one alarm set, I've noticed increased dream activity. This came to a head last night when I had one particularly unpleasant dream that happened to be much more vivid than usual. I can't say it was terrifying or a full-fledged nightmare, but it was disturbing enough that I decided that I'm going to try harder to get rid of my dreams than I did before. Now that I've decided to say no to dreams, I'm going to go back to setting my alarm to multiple times during the night. That should take care of it. What I want to know, however, is this: Is it unhealthy to set your alarm to multiple times during the night? Does it deprive you of sleep? Judging by my decreased dream activity, I'm guessing that setting that many alarms reduces my REM cycles. Those who say that REM cycles are important for feeling well-rested and mentally alert the next day should know that I haven't felt the slightest bit more well-rested or alert after the last three or four nights that I made sure to only set one alarm. What should I do?

[cygnus]

Everyone naturally wakes up a few times early in the morning but many people aren't aware of those instances (or just forget about them); so waking up a few times really shouldn't have an effect on your sleep hygiene. However, you might only want to use an alarm temporarily to train yourself to wake up because you will often wake up when your body isn't really ready for it (think of it as a sudden change from lower frequency brainwaves to alertness rather than the gradual increase that is normal). I almost always wake up around 3 or 4am to get up an go to the bathroom - the helps a lot with dreaming (think of the wild and wbtb techniques). I also feel much better when this happens than those rare instances when I don't wake up until a few hours later. So I would recommend drinking water before bed or something like that so you wake up naturally. When you wake up in the early morning and get out of bed for a bit, you bring more awareness into your next segment of sleep. Also, your brain is expecting to get back into REM sleep around those times, and you may enter that stage sooner depending on how long you stay awake. As long as you are getting enough sleep overall you shouldn't have to worry about losing REM sleep, as it is typically a lack of deep (delta wave) sleep than can cause some problems.