Sorry i know im new but, what is an REM cycle?

[HigherDreamer]

I see that term everywhere about lucidity but i never understand what it means? Or what it has to do with lucid dreaming can someone please clear this up for me so i can fully understand the rest of the techniques and stuff! thanks!

[divinemission]

REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement. From what I understand, REM cycles occur during the night after several hours of sleep. It is a very important part of dreaming because as we look around in the dream world, our eyes move in the same general direction as our body sleeps. This Wikipedia article can explain it better than I can: Rapid eye movement sleep - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Matte87]

We sleep in cycles. They are usually around 90 minutes and divided into different kinds of sleep. It starts off with a few minutes of very light sleep, which then turns into deep sleep and lastly REM sleep. The first three cycles barely have any REM sleep at all in them, and as REM periods gradually gets longer, the Deep sleep periods gets shorter. In the morning we are almost completely in REM sleep, and like divinemission said, it's the stage in which we dream. What you want for WBTB and WILD is to wake up just before or as a REM cycle starts. This is to be able to quickly fall back asleep and enter REM right away.

[HigherDreamer]

So i should set an alarm for what time? Like if i went to bed at 10 30? should set one up for say 3?

[Matte87]

Yeah that's 4½ hours into sleep. Or you can set one 6 hours into sleep. I prefer 6 hours myself as the REM period is longer by then. You can write down times you wake up for a few weeks and see how long your cycles are. It's not very easy to synch it sometimes, but 4½ and 6 hours into sleep is usually good.