h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't heard about hospital use of the effect of white noise on going to/staying asleep and it is something I am interested in.

I suffer from a rather strange sleep disorder - I do not dream very often. Before you all shout that just because I don't remember blah blah blah I have spent time in hospital sleeping with electrodes all over my head, a peg on my finger to check my oxygen levels and being videod! The result of the recordings from the electrodes was that I did not dream even once all night. The technician was absolutely amazed and told me he had not had even one other with a similar brain pattern! They could not offer me any suggestions as to how to sort out this problem and it is a problem I assure you. The effect of not dreaming, i.e. not getting any REM sleep, is quite serious because, for reasons not clear as yet, REM sleep is very important to us and our bodies will try to make up for a deficit any way it can - I am liable to fall asleep at any time without any warning. If I am busy and active, at work for example, I am OK but when I sit down and relax I have been known to fall asleep in mid-sentence.
This problem is also experienced by sufferers of sleep apnea.
I feel like I sleep well but the quality of sleep is not balanced between REM and the deeper slow wave sleep - thus I am physicaaly rested but not mentally (in some way?).
Anyone else similarly affected?

Wow, glad I´m not in your shoes. I like sleeping and dreaming. I heard somewhere that everyone (well aprently not everyone) has 6-8 different dreams a night. On a good day I can remember 5 vividly.

There is a Star Trek episode that deals with the effects of not being able to REM sleep. It´s called "Night Terrors" and they all went crazy from it. I could not even begin to imagine the horror of not being able to dream, do you never remember any dreams at all? You must have dreamt at some point in your life...

Nitpicker, don´t you think you maybe could earn a lot of money being a lab rat? You could probably help brain researchers a lot on the subject of dreams.

I am not saying that I NEVER dream but it is very rare and remembering a dream is a once a year event (approx). I do sometimes know that I have had a dream because I just feel different when I wake up - can't describe quite how 'different' but different nevertheless.
It doesn't stop me from enjoying sleeping

If I didn´t have my dreams every night, I don´t think I would enjoy going to sleep nearly as much...

I have very interesting dreams and that´s the reason I love sleeping.
If I go even one night without remembering a dream, I get upset and my whole mood is ruined...
So I would probably go insane if I had your problem...

I had a friend once who had a similar condition. I believe it is called 'narcolepsy.'

I've used white noise from the radio before. I'm one of those types that requires relative darkness and silence before he can get to sleep. If there are too many outside noises that aren't the sort that can be easily ignored, white noise does a greast job of covering them. It's not something I've used a lot... just something I can resort to when the noise is annoying and my need for sleep is great.

At this time of year, many nights, I have to lay on my side. The allergies flare up and the sinuses fill up. Laying on my side gives me an opportunity to keep one nasal passage open for the night.

Has anyone else ever experimented with dream control? As a young child (age 7 or so) my brothers and I all experimented with it, and we all reported good results. Just before going to sleep, we'd consciously think about dreaming, and of taking over the dream. Then, at some point in the dream, I'd suddenly realize what was going on. I could then employ all sorts of weird tactics. People would respond as I wanted them, I could create items out of thin air, fly, or whatever. I quit doing it, though. It seemed to make a connection between the conscious and subconscious states that was too strong to maintain... I would always wake up shortly after. I eventually decided that I was ruining my dreams, and that they were much more interesting when left to their own devices. I'm pretty sure I could duplicate the results (I did again at various points in my childhood), but I've lost my desire to.

I very rarely remember my dreams, but they're usually pretty cool. Even if I can't remember them, I'm left with an impression of them, a sort of emotional residue. There have been times when I've woken up laughing myself silly. When I replay what had occurred, I wonder why I'm laughing at all. I guess it's only funny in the context of the dream, and makes no sense in the conscious mind. Then again, almost all of my dreams are absolute nonsense... probably why I don't remember them. My conscious mind wants nothing to do with them.

I think narcolepsy is just the falling asleep at weird times, it doesn´t have anything to do with absence of dreaming.

I have never deliberatly done any dream control, but sometimes when I have dreamt it has suddenly dawned on me that I was dreaming. But I´be just kind of leaned back to see where it would take me, I haven´t interacted with it. I also sometimes suddenly realize I am sleeping, does this happen to others?

Oh yes all the time... Sometimes I dreamt that I´m awake and everything in my day just goes wrong. Then suddenly I realise that I´m still sleeping and I wake up and start the whole thing over.
Sometimes it takes two or three times before I really wake up...

I dream a lot. I definitely dream more than five dreams per night. I have an entry about seven dreams that I dreamt during about three hours of sleep. I have experimented with dream control, which is called lucid dreaming, and I would like to do it a bit more. My problem is I'm very busy nowadays and to really go into dreams takes a lot of time and effort ... preparing your mind before, and remembering everything after. My dreams are ultra-weird and I love them a lot.

I sometimes have a problem waking up after sleeping. I mean I know I'm asleep and I'm trying to wake up but I cannot! I find that my body is paralyzed, I can't move, and sometimes it takes me a very long time of trying to move before at last I succeed and properly wake up.

When I was 5 I had a recurring nightmare, it scared the willies off me. I had very regularly. One night I told myself I was fed up with it and that if I saw the signs of it coming (the dream built up into a nightmare, rather like a good book) then I'd know it wasn't so bad. That night I had the dream and was able to wake myself up. After that I never had the dream again.

That's interesting. Nowadays I don't have nightmares anymore because by now I also know the signs when they're coming and I can either wake myself up or divert it into something that is not a nightmare. Anyways I am not scared of anything anymore nowadays (I live in Africa, if that explains anything), so whatever happens in a dream, I just accept it and go with it.

Pillowcase: The body actually goes into a state where you can´t move when you´re dreaming. This is to prevent you from living out your dreams and get hurt. But it can sometimes happen people wake up, and still are frozen. Apparently really scary. Also imagine waking up at night finding you can´t move, and your imagination making the different objects in the room look like persons. Like when you were a kid. Might be the reason for many abduction experiences.

Anyone else had seriously high-speed dreaming experiences?

Some years ago, I used to wake up to the 8am news bulletin on BBC Radio 4 on a low-volume clock/radio. The 3 or 4 minute program was composed of an initial 30 second section of maybe 10 news headlines, followed by a few more detailed 30-60 second pieces.
Many times, I woke up at the start of one of the more detailed pieces having already experienced a subjectively extremely long dream involving that particular story, and thinking 'Hang on, I know all this already'. The dreams had often involved large amounts of detail, conversation, long stretches of reflection, and had the feeling of an hour or two of intense movie experience, colour/touch,/smell/emotion, yet in some cases, according to the clock, they must have happened in less than a minute.

Still, I supppose those few minutes of falling asleep and waking up are often quite fertile ground for inspiration or imagination, and I've often woken up, looked at the time, dozed for what feels like hours of pondering, and then woken again to find the time only a few minutes later.

Yep, Xanatic, that's the reason, I know it quite well, I just didn't wanna show off. I just wanted to tell people what it felt like, because it affects me quite regularly. It is not so much scary as uncomfortable. When you can't move like that, your mind can vary from half-dreaming to fully awake. However you can't see anything in the room either - you may still see images from the dreams. You are only aware of your body, lying in bed, unable to move.

As for high-speed dreams, yes, that's the way most of my dreams go. It can actually feel like days, weeks, even years of experience going by. I did stuff like checking the time, and I know that I have had long and detailed dreams in periods such as five minutes or less. I know in the dream state you can get an idea, instantly, but that idea has a time sense to it often with a past history going back some way, that you somehow interpret as having experienced that history.

Dax said:

"Sometimes I dreamt that I´m awake and everything in my day just goes wrong. Then suddenly I realise that I´m still sleeping and I wake up and start the whole thing over.
Sometimes it takes two or three times before I really wake up..."

This usually happens to me when I'm anxious about the following day, like once when I had to get up to catch an early flight I dreamt that I overslept and missed it - eight times!

I've had trouble falling asleep in the past - I've found that a little TV noise helps. Ideally, it should be something I've seen like a million times before, so that I practically know all the lines by heart...Now whenever I can't fall asleep I put on Independence Day, and I'm sure to be out like a light in 15 minutes.

This one's tough to explain ...

When I was young, I can remember having nightmares that were just expanses of colour. Sort of like being in a void with different lighting. But the intensity of the colour created big bursts of energy within me (rather like a caffeine buzz). Generally the change in colours would be the thing that scared me.

Strange thing is - this all happened to me when I was about 6 or 7 and I had completely forgotten about it until recently. Then for some reason it either happened again or I daydreamt it. Just thinking about it now, begins to arouse those feelings again ...

BBS

PS Just been thinking. Maybe this is why I now like to sleep with the curtains open. But recently I haven't been because my girlfriend likes them closed. I'm sure that explains it.

When I was young I used to find it very difficult to get to sleep. The only method I foudn helped was imagining a wall made of bricks. Each brick was a different colour. They had no texture. The cement inbetween was pure white and also had no texture. I would imagine all the different colours. Slowly I would pan in on the colour white - it used to fascinate me that all the other colours had a white border seperating them except for the white brick which stopped when another colour began!

Sleeping's great isn't it?

One thing... babies in the womb REM sleep - that's why they kick - they're sleeping, not playing football. that's why they stop kicking when they're about to be born - i think even i'd like to be awake for that one, how do they dream? what do they dream about? d'you think they have similar dreams to us - beggs all sorts of questions to do with a collective unconscious. is there one? are we all plugged in? are archetypal stories part of that?

narcalepsy? isn't that when the body rapidly and unexpectedly goes into REM sleep?

If that is what narcolepsy is I definitely have NOT got it - REM sleep is what I lack!

Well, people don´t normally kick when they are sleeping. So why would babies? I suppose the muscle thing hasn´t "kicked in" yet. But I don´t think babies can see anything, so they probably doesn´t have visual dreams. And they probably don´t taste or smell(!) either so just hearing dreams I guess.

Isn´t that whole sub/conciousness thing a relic of the past?