Dreams happen during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. In a typical night, you dream for a total of 2 hours, broken up by the sleep cycle. Researchers do not know much about how we dream or why. They do know that newborns dream and that depriving rats of REM sleep greatly shortens their lives. Other mammals and birds also have REM sleep stages, but cold-blooded animals such as turtles, lizards and fish do not.
Once reserved for holidays and houseguests, air beds have recently carved out a much broader niche in the bed world, due largely to the efforts of the Sleep Number mattress company, maker of the popular Sleep Number bed. Today’s more robust, upscale air beds look similar to innerspring mattresses, but use air in lieu of coils. For aficionados, the air bed’s most attractive feature is its adjustable firmness, which can be easily tweaked by increasing or decreasing the air pressure ...
Continue Reading →Sleep, we all love it, especially when you wake up from a great night’s sleep. In the past, sleep was often ignored by doctors and surrounded by myths, but now we are beginning to understand the importance of sleep to overall health and well-being. In fact, when people get less than 6 or 7 hours of sleep each night, their risk for developing diseases begins to increase.
Heart attacks and strokes are more common during ...
Continue Reading →“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” – Henry David Thoreau
Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Chances are that you’ve often found yourself puzzling over the mysterious content of a dream, or perhaps you’ve wondered why you dream at all.
First, let’s start by answering a basic question – What is a dream? A dream can include any of the images, thoughts and emotions that ...
Continue Reading →Night terrors are a common sleep problem among children. By some estimates, about 15% of younger children have occasional night terrors. Although most common in children between the ages of 2 and 6 years, they can occur at almost any age.
Although usually considered to be normal or benign, they are often very scary and distressing to parents who often overreact, especially during a child’s first night terror.
When you hear how most experts describe night terrors, it is easy to see ...
Continue Reading →According to the American Psychiatric Association, sleep disorders are major disturbances of normal sleep patterns that lead to distress and disrupt functioning during the day (APA, 2000). Not only are sleep disorder extremely common, affecting virtually everyone at some point in their lives, but they can also lead to serious stress and other health consequences.
According to a major survey by the National Sleep Foundation, more than half of Americans reported experiencing at least one symptoms of insomnia several times a ...
Continue Reading →When was the last time you found yourself drifting off in the middle of a long class lecture or meeting? According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2008 “Sleep in America” poll, 29% of participants reported becoming very sleepy or even falling asleep at work in the previous month alone.
Recent research has linked lack of sleep to a wide range of ailments, including memory problems and obesity. Learn more about some of the top reasons why you should get a good ...
Continue Reading →Your “sleep hygiene” describes your sleep habits. By improving your sleep habits, you can increase your chance of falling asleep fast, staying asleep and sleeping between seven to nine hours each night. A good night’s sleep has many health benefits. Most importantly, you will feel great.
The bedroom should be used only for sleep and sex. That means no reading in bed and no TV in bed. Doing these things (or anything else) ...
Continue Reading →The invention of the electroencephalograph allowed scientists to study sleep in ways that were not previously possible. During the 1950s, a gradate student named Eugene Aserinsky used this tool to discover what is known today as REM sleep. Further studies of human sleep have demonstrated that sleep progresses through a series of stages in which different brain wave patterns are displayed.
There are two main types of sleep:
During the earliest phases of sleep, you are still relatively awake ...
Continue Reading →The science of sleep is a modern one – in fact most scientific information on sleep has been gained in the last 25 years. This is a list of 20 very interesting facts about sleep.
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