If a person is often woken up as soon as REM sleep or natural sleep starts, they may develop serious problems and even hallucinations over time.
Sleep has become a casualty of the modern and competitive world. Long hours at the office, staring at the screen for long hours and improper dietary habits all combine and causes a lack of sleep or insomnia. Lack of sleep often impairs the cognitive efficiency of the person. People often opt for sedatives which can of course never imitate natural sleep.
Sleep is a complex which still not fully understood by science. However, we do know that sleep induces the brain to put the short term memory into permanent memory and also remove the clutter just as a computer removes the temporary files and clears the cache.
Dreaming and Natural Sleep
Another important part of the sleep process is dreams. Dreaming is an essential part of the sleep process. When a person sleeps he steadily falls deeper into the process of what is known as the NREM sleep. NREM is known as the Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This leads to the REM or Rapid Eye Movement Sleep.
This is the time when the person has dreams and can be judged by the rapid eyeball movement. The brain is in a very active stage but switches off the body. In some persons, this function fails and it is then the person starts’ having what is known as somnambulism or sleepwalking.
A person dreams a number of times but only the dreams which we see just before waking up can be remembered. Experiments have shown that REM sleep, dream sleep or natural sleep is very important. If a person is woken up as soon as REM sleep starts and then again allowed to sleep, they may develop serious problems and even hallucinations over time.
This is the reason why sedatives can never provide sleep like natural sleep nor does it re-invigorate like natural sleep. Sedatives can never provide the REM sleep-like natural sleep.
