Thread: Does much sleep affect dream recall?

Originally Posted by Witchtheworld

I sleep 8 hours from Monday to Friday, and I started to sleep 10 hours every weekend. Today is Saturday morning(after my first attempt to sleep extra 2 hours on weekends) and I remembered two long dreams(nightmare). Maybe it was just a placebo affect. Am I just wasting two hours of my life? Or will I have better dream recall every weekend?

Everyone is required to have atleast 8 hours a sleep each night. Adding an hour or two won't do any harm.

Well my science here might be a little dodgy, but I'm fairly sure we have REM cycles of roughly 100 minutes, however the first few hours of sleep are generally non-REM. We have dreams during REM periods, so by waking up after about 4.5, 6 and 7.5 hours most people will recall dreams. If you sleep for 10 hours, though, you will get an extra REM period than if you sleep for 8 hours, and because it is right at the end you will have almost 100 minutes of exclusive REM sleep, whereas say the cycle beginning after around 6 hours might be half REM and half non-REM. Therefore, yes sleeping in will probably help improve your recall, as you will have a huge chunk of REM sleep right before you wake up. I think I might have left something out but there we go .

My best time frame for LDing is at 9 hours. More sleep seems to help.

Personally, I normally sleep less than 8 hours - more like 7.5 hours - and then just wake up and if I force myself to sleep more I don't feel as refreshed. But sometimes I sleep more like 8 hours or even up to 9. I try not to oversleep too frequently because it sometimes messes up my sleep routine.

Now, about too much sleep and LDing - it's not necessary for me... WBTBs work better for me - so I essentially have some awake time in the early morning instead of the extra sleep time (when my studies make it possible). But I think it's different for anyone, so you should find out what works best for you.

That being said, much dream recall can give you the illusion of oversleeping... For example I had three "epic" non-lucid dreams this morning (each was >10 hours plot wise) with extremely good recall, so when I woke up I was sure I overslept by at least several hours - but no, had still ~7:45 hours of sleep (excluding the WBTB period).

This is weird, but I've noticed I normally have worse recall if I sleep too much. I don't know exactly whether this is exclusively related to the amount of sleep, but normally on weekends I tend to have worse recall. Don't take it too seriously though, because maybe it's also because on weekends I go to bed later.

I think the amount of sleep one should get isn't so much about what's universally "recommended", it's more about finding your perfect amount of hours. I've always been a light sleeper and I feel fresh after 7 hours of sleep, whereas for instance my boyfriend needs to sleep over 9 hours.

Usually more sleep won't do you any harm, but I have done WBTBs these last three nights and I've slept some 9 hours each night, except for last night, when I woke up at 4:30am after 4 hours of sleep and I felt wide awake. I tossed and turned for a couple of hours until I managed to sleep for another hour. I've felt fine throughout the day. It's like for two nights I had saved extra sleep and I didn't need it today.

What I'm trying to say is, for me there's an optimal amount of sleep for best recall. If I oversleep, it has to be for one day only. But I'm a little weird when it comes to sleeping, this might not be the same for everyone.

One prevailing theory about sleep stages is the idea of sleep debt. As time passes, your body accumulates the need to restore itself. Sleep provides this restoration, but it is somewhat complicated. Deep NREM sleep operates to restore bodily fatigue. REM and dreaming operate to restore mental faculty. On top of that, there is a natural order of NREM first and REM second. Altogether, it is a delicate balancing act of loosely connected and asymmetrical factors.

So, sleep is helpful because it pays down the debt accumulated by waking. But it is not absolutely true that more sleep means more benefit or more dreams. If your schedule is very regular, then you probably fall into a natural rhythm of balance. But if your schedule is irregular, or even just occasionally oddball, then you may experience transient spikes and valleys when dreams and lucidity seem more or less apparent. The underlying explanation might not be what you do on a particular that day -- whether you were diligent in your recall or RCs. It might be your accumulated debt of action (karma) that has the greatest influences on tonight's dreams