When you are asleep, you go through several stages. These stages are there for lots of reasons. For instance, scientists believe that dreaming and sleeping may have something to do with how you form your memories, and another stage of sleep makes sure that you don’t act out your dreams, because that could be dangerous.
What are the stages of sleep?
The first stage of sleep is when you are just falling asleep. You are in a very light sleep mode and you may get woken up at any time and for any reason. The second stage is a little bit deeper, and then, when you get to stages three and four, you are in the deepest part of your sleep cycle. Throughout these cycles and as your sleep is getting deeper and deeper, your brain activity decreases and eventually, you start experiencing what is know as delta waves and little else. There are different types of brainwaves and delta waves are the slowest ones.
When you go into the fifth stage of sleep, you start going into something called REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement and it does exactly as it says, your eyes move around quite a bit under your eyelids. That’s not the only thing that happens, though.
Your blood pressure rises, both your heart rate and your breathing start to get faster, and brain waves increase to the same level as they do when you are awake. When you are in REM sleep, however, your body is completely paralyzed. You can’t move and that may be so you don’t act out your dreams. Despite scientists originally believing that if you didn’t get REM asleep you wouldn’t dream, this has been proven not to be the case.
How Do Dreams Work?
Well, we are not actually sure what they are, so before we figure that out, more studies need to be done in regards to dreams. We already know something about sleep, though what happens in our brains is still somewhat of a mystery.
