Insomnia and Missing Dreams
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

You have to understand the key components of a good night's sleep before you can deal with insomnia.

I caught a bad cold over the weekend and slept over seven hours last night. For me an illness is a blessing because it gives me a couple hours more hours of sleep than usual. My body is a bit weaker but my mind is clearer.

I am an insomniac, like about a quarter of adult Americans. My problem isn’t trouble falling asleep. That’s the less serious kind. I have the other kind. I fall asleep within five minutes of turning out the lights but can’t stay asleep long enough to wake feeling refreshed.

According to sleep researchers a good night’s sleep typically consists of four cycles. Each cycle lasts between 60 and 130 minutes and includes both R.E.M. (rapid eye movement) and non-R.E.M. sleep. For healthy individuals each stretch of R.E.M. sleep is preceded by between 30 and 60 minutes of non-R.E.M. sleep. During each of the night’s first two sleep cycles the brain takes about 30 to 40 minutes to descend through three progressively deeper stages of sleep before entering the stage known as deep sleep. After about a half hour of deep sleep it moves back up through progressively lighter stages of sleep before entering R.E.M. sleep or dream sleep.

R.E.M. sleep — during which dreams occur — is relatively shallow, at a level of sleep just below that at which a person initially nods off. This makes R.E.M. sleep particularly vulnerable to interruption. The night’s first interval of R.E.M. sleep typically lasts only about 20 minutes. This is followed by about 15-20 minutes during which the brain descends toward a second and final stage of deep sleep.

With each successive cycle the R.E.M. stage lengthens. The longest comes in tne final cycle just before waking. These final two stages of dream sleep are the parts most likely to be lost for me and others who share my type of insomnia.

It eased my mind greatly to learn that deep sleep — the most physically revitalizing stage — comes only during the two cycles occurring within the first four hours of sleep. It’s during the deep sleep stages that hormones are released to regulate growth and rebuild cells. It is also when our immune systems operates at their highest levels. So my insomnia isn’t putting me in much jeopardy physically as I rarely have trouble sleeping through the first two cycles.

My problem is that I keep waking up during the final two cycles made up of relatively shallow non-R.E.M. and R.E.M. sleep. By around two or three a.m. I find myself slowly awakening to the bitter awareness that I’m done sleeping for the night. The loss of the two final cycles and their long dream sleep is what consigns me to days feeling like a ghost. A fifteen-minute nap often eases the suffering, but that’s always a catch-as-catch-can proposition once I am in the grip of a busy day.

Dream sleep orders the mind for lucid functioning, according to sleep experts. As you dream, the experiences of the previous day are evaluated and sorted into memory pathways for quick retrieval. When this ordering process is disrupted, your mind gets bogged down like a librarian working with aisles piled high with unsorted books.

Having been robbed of the better part of my dreams is worse than being robbed of money or possessions. In a dream-deprived state I don’t aspire to a wonderful day but merely to get through it without falling behind on my agenda. Insomnia regularly robs me of that dream-fed surplus of emotional vitality that fuels the most joyful moments of each day.

So over the years I have become a practical expert on ways to nurture dream sleep and in other strategies for restoring emotional vitality. You might think that a debility that robs one of the most poetic part of human existence might answer to a poetic solution. To a surprising extent, it does. But that solution must be premised on some rigorous attention to exercise, nutrition and even life philosophy. More on those later.