While reading the book Left for Dead by Pete Nelson, I discovered the following section of the book on how your body is affected when you don't get enough REM sleep. According to my last sleep study, only 7% of my sleep was REM sleep. I very rarely get restorative, restful sleep. I have never heard of hypnagogic sleep/dreams before reading this book, but it explains very closely (just a bit more severe than mine, obviously!) how my sleep feels to me.
The book, Left for Dead, was about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945. Book description from Amazon.com: "Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in 14 minutes. More than 1,000 men were thrown into shark-infested waters. Those who survived the fiery sinking—some injured, many without life jackets—struggled to stay afloat in shark-infested waters as they waited for rescue. But the United States Navy did not even know they were missing. The Navy needed a scapegoat for this disaster. So it court-martialed the captain for “hazarding” his ship. The survivors of theIndianapolis knew that their captain was not to blame. For 50 years they worked to clear his name, even after his untimely death. But the navy would not budge—until an 11-year-old boy named Hunter Scott entered the picture. His history fair project on the Indianapolis soon became a crusade to restore the captain’s good name and the honor of the men who served under him."
Lack of REM sleep/Hypnagogic Sleep and Dreams
"Many of the men went 'out of their heads,' to varying degrees, for varying lengths of time, from simple sleep deprivation. Hallucinations, compelling fantasies, obsessive thoughts, uncontrollable fears and emotions, delirium, hopelessness and despair are all expressions of psychic damage, and during sleep is the time when the psyche heals and repairs itself by dreaming. Without sleep, microscopic psychic injuries can rub and chafe and become infected too.
"It's not just any kind of sleep that the mind needs to repair itself. The deepest sleep we experience, perhaps a dozen times a night, is called Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, sleep. It's also the time when our muscles become totally relaxed, to the point where we can no longer move. REM sleep is absolutely essential to our well-being. In a pioneering study of REM sleep done at Stanford University, rats were deprived of REM sleep when they were placed on an overturned flowerpot in the middle of a bucket of water. The rat being studied could balance on the pot as long as it had muscle tone, even fall asleep, but as soon as it entered REM and lost muscle tone, it fell off the pot and into the water. After a few days, the formerly docile laboratory rats turned into hyperaggressive, psychotic rats that fought with one another and bit the lab workers who were trying to handle them. What happened to the men in the water was similar to what happened to those rats. The men wearing life jackets who tried to sleep found that as soon as they lost muscle tone, their faces would fall forward into the water, waking them up and depriving them of REM sleep.
"When men could doze off (and never for more than a few minutes at a time) they experienced a much lighter, less restorative kind of sleep called hypnagogic sleep. Whereas REM sleep brings with it dreams unrelated to current experience or daily life, hypnagogic dreams at the onset of sleep take place in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, and correspond more closely to recent events in the subject's life, fusing reality and fantasy. Hypnagogic dreams tend to be primarily visual in quality, hallucinations that seem, to the dreamer, to be quite well organized and internally coherent, bizarre fantasies that nevertheless make perfect sense somehow. They are also dreams we feel we can participate in rather than simply observe. hypnagogic dreams also tend to express a heightened awareness of the body's position or condition, dreams where, for example, if your arm has fallen asleep in bed, you might dream your hand has become encased in concrete and you can't lift it. (Nelson, 79-80)."Book excerpt from Left for Dead, by Pete Nelson.
