Look up the Golden Ratio on the net if you don't know what it is... I'm not going to explain it here. But I am going to use phi to explain how you can mathematically calculate your REM cycles.
Most of us do not know the exact length of our own sleep cycles. The average cycle lasts 90 minutes, so that is the number I will use for this example. If you know how long your cycles typically are, you can replace 90 with a more appropriate number.
If A is your sleep cycle, then B is ( A * 1/1.618 ), and C is ( A * ( 1 - 1/1.618 ) ):
A = 90 minutes
B = 55.6 minutes
C = 34.4 minutes
When you look at a hypnogram, you can literally see the Golden Ratio towards the latter sleep cycles. I don't know why it is not evident in the earlier ones, but I hypothesize there are additional iterations of phi extended into those instances as well. What I mean is that looking at your first sleep cycle, we should all agree that you don't have 34.4 minutes of REM. We all know the REM cycle is much smaller during the first few cycles and grows larger towards the end. So if you take the value of C above and plug it back into the formula, you get this:
A = 34.4 minutes
B = 21.2 minutes
C = 13.13 minutes
Now 13 minutes of REM during your first sleep cycle is sounding much more reasonable, and very likely. As you build on this theory, you can calculate the duration of REM during each sleep cycle throughout the night. I think these numbers provide a good base-line to conduct further tests. What I'm most interested in, though, are the later sleep cycles - why waste effort on smaller targets when there are larger ones at the end? Not to mention the likelihood of remembering a dream from the last sleep cycle of the night as opposed to the first, but I digress.
Looking at the 5th cycle of some hypnograms, you can see it is very likely that the original figures of B = 55.6 and C = 34.4 could be applied here. For this reason, I'm suggesting that you set the initial delay of your Remee timer to 35 minutes (rounding up since we can't program seconds). As for the signal interval, you'll have 56 minutes of REM remaining which we'll plug back into our formula:
A = 56 minutes
B = 34 minutes
C = 21 minutes
Now we'll take the 34 and plug it back into the equation to generate a shorter interval and increase our chances of seeing the light while still using a "Golden" value:
A = 34 minutes
B = 21 minutes
C = 13 minutes
And there you have it - the Golden Remee configuration:
Sleep Cycle = 90 minutes
Golden Delay = 34 minutes
Golden Interval = 13 minutes
Why would this work? Well it might not if you don't typically have 90 minute sleep cycles. Plug in your own numbers, then program your Remee. Why does everything else in the known universe obey the Golden Ratio to some degree? Why would our own rhythmic cycles be exempt from this cosmic constant?
FYI, in tracking my own sleep cycles (mentioned in an earlier post), I've seen them decline to around 55 minutes in length (wow, imagine that, one of the first golden numbers above!). Using that number, I have programmed my Remee with the following:
Sleep Cycle = 55 minutes
Golden Delay = 21 minutes
Golden Interval = 8 minutes
Additionally, I would not wear the Remee all night. Again, stop trying to hit a smaller target in the beginning when it will be much larger towards the end. Apply the numbers you've obtained from the formulas above to the nap mode settings. Set an alarm for 6 hours after laying down. When the alarm goes off, put on your Remee, turn it on, hold the button for 3 seconds to go into nap mode, and go back to sleep. Make sure you have another alarm set to get up for the day :-)
Here is a diagram if you know your cycle duration (sorry, didn't look pretty with tabs, so I put slashes instead):
Sleep Cycle / Golden Delay / Golden Interval
30 / 11.46 / 4.38
35 / 13.37 / 5.11
40 / 15.28 / 5.84
45 / 17.19 / 6.56
50 / 19.10 / 7.29
55 / 21.01 / 8.02
60 / 22.92 / 8.75
65 / 24.83 / 9.48
70 / 26.74 / 10.21
75 / 28.65 / 10.94
80 / 30.56 / 11.67
85 / 32.47 / 12.40
90 / 34.38 / 13.13
95 / 36.29 / 13.86
100 / 38.20 / 14.59
105 / 40.11 / 15.32
110 / 42.01 / 16.05
115 / 43.92 / 16.78
120 / 45.83 / 17.51
Enjoy!
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