the.com/rem sleep
Your brain, wide awake, hallucinating a plot it insists you star in.
means The sleep stage marked by Rapid Eye Movement, fast brain activity similar to being awake, and temporary paralysis of most muscles — it's when the most vivid, story-like dreams happen.
from Named simply for what researchers observed under the eyelids: the eyes darting rapidly back and forth. Scientists identified the pattern in the early 1950s while monitoring sleeping subjects with electrodes, noticing these bursts of eye movement correlated with reports of vivid dreaming when the sleepers were woken. The muscle paralysis — technically called atonia — turned out to be the body's own safety switch, keeping you from acting out the plot your brain insists you star in.
- muscle lockdown
- body goes paralyzed so dreams cannot be acted out
- eye giveaway
- eyes dart rapidly, giving the stage its name
- timing pattern
- cycles lengthen, longest REM stretch hits near morning
- memory job
- helps glue emotions and memories into long-term storage