Need help understanding sleep stages

**TheaterOfDreams** · 03-25-2013 10:24 PM

Hey. Ive tried reading about dream stages in a couple of sites, but the description is very vauge and amateurish.

Ive written a forum which can organize the sleep stages in a way which i can understand. If you can fill the form below, it will be very helpful*:

Dream stage 1 duration:
Dream stage 2 duration
Dream stage 3 duration:
Dream stage 4 duration:

*The duration is NOT time after sleep ( "stage 2 is lasts 30 minutes after youve started to sleep") but duration of the phase itself ("stage 2 lasts 20 minutes")

And to make it sure - only stage 3 is REM sleep - yeah?

btw, im new

**dutchraptor** · 03-25-2013 11:38 PM

There are 4 stages of sleep.
N1,N2,N3,N4 and REM. The first four are non-rem stages of sleep in which you are not dreaming and it is extremely hard to get a proper dream or lucid dream.
Every 90 minutes of sleep you will pass through N1 N2 N3 N4 and have from 10-50 minutes of rem sleep.
Sorry I can use the format you gave since it doesn't work that way, look at this picture and I will explain it.

When we first fall asleep we pass through the first stage of sleep, then the second and third and fourth. These last two are considered deep sleep in which we don't really have dreams. To get ot that stage takes around 45 minutes. Then we go back into lighter sleep from stage 4 back to stage 1 and we have 10 minutes of dream sleep.
This cycle repeats over the night but your dreamless sleep becomes shorter and your dreaming sleep, rem becomes longer.

**anum1234** · 03-28-2013 01:17 PM

The sleep cycle changes throughout life. A newborn baby has sleep cycles lasting only 45 minutes, but by the age of 10, a child has sleep cycles between 90 and 110 minutes.