Dreaming During NREM
Although study participants' reports of intensified dream vividness during REM sleep and increased recollection of dreams occurring during that phase suggest that dreaming most commonly occurs during that stage, dreaming can also occur during NREM sleep.
Research has also shown that dreams during the NREM stage most commonly occur during the morning hours which is also the time period with the highest occurrence of REM sleep. This was found through a study involving subjects taking naps over specific intervals of time and being forcefully awakened, their sleep was separated into naps including only REM sleep and only NREM sleep using polysomnography. This implies that the polysomnographic occurrence of REM sleep is not required for dreaming. Rather, the actual mechanisms that create REM sleep cause changes to ones' sleep experience. Through these changes, by morning, a sub-cortical activation occurs during NREM that is comparable to the type that occurs during REM. It is this sub-cortical activation that results in dreaming during the NREM stage during the morning hours.
Read more about this topic: Non-rapid Eye Movement Sleep
Famous quotes containing the word dreaming:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)