sorry if you want to slap me right now but I've been reading about these REM cycles for months and still have no idea what it is. I tried to Google it but something tells me that it didn't give me the result I was looking for.:P
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sorry if you want to slap me right now but I've been reading about these REM cycles for months and still have no idea what it is. I tried to Google it but something tells me that it didn't give me the result I was looking for.:P
REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement. ._.
I will copy a post I just made in another thread, no need to re-type it all again :) Hope it can be of some use. I'm not quite sure from your post if you are asking what REM stands for, or what it is. I know your thread title asks for what it stands for, but in your post you ask about what it is? At any rate, here's the info just in case :D
Essentially, your sleep cycle is categorized in non-rapid eye movement sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. Non-rapid eye movement sleep is subdivided into 3 stages.
Stage 1 is transition between drowsiness and light sleep, where stage 2 is actual sleep. Stage 3 is deep sleep (also called delta sleep).
Two important aspects of REM sleep is that your REM periods will increase in duration as the night progresses, and the interval between your REM periods will decrease; thus you will experience increasingly longer REM periods over shorter intervals of time. In average you will have around 5 REM periods during your sleep, and the longest ones will have a duration of around 40 to 60 minutes. So not even close to that of 8 hours.
Usually a sleeping cycle progress from stage 1 to stage 3, then it goes back to stage to. After around 70-90 minutes of going to sleep, you will experience your first REM period, which in the beginning will be short, roughly around 10 minutes. After it ends, you might slip back up into stage 2 of non-rapid eye movement sleep, go back into delta, then come back up for your next REM period, and so on throughout the night.
There is not much you need to know about REM sleep of technical terms to understand the basic outline of it (I surely don't ). REM sleep is simply a dream stage which is characterized by your eyes moving very rapidly. Another thing is that most dreams, and most vivid dreams people report, have taken place in REM sleep, that is to say, REM sleep is more or less the stage in which we dream.
Another thing about REM sleep is that your body gets paralyzed in order to prevent you from acting out your dreams. Sometimes sleep paralysis doesn't turn off right when you awake, and this is where you can get those scary experiences of being unable to move while seeing or hearing odd things around you.
If you have a pet you can actually also observe REM sleep. When my dog sleeps in my room at night, there will be times where I can see him twitching a lot, small movements of his legs and so on. His eyes will also be moving around a lot. Additionally you can also hear him barking a bit and so forth. Actually he's doing it as I write this
You can read more about it here:
Rapid eye movement sleep - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia