Topic
Every Kingdom of Dream article tagged REM — 9 pieces across 5 sections.
Sleep Science
Sleep is not a single state you fall into and climb out of. It is four distinct conditions the brain cycles through, and the order they arrive in explains almost everything about how a night feels.
Dream Research
There is no consensus, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the competing explanations are more interesting than the certainty on offer, and they are not all mutually exclusive.
Lucid Dreaming
It was demonstrated in a laboratory in 1981 by a dreamer signalling with his eyes. Everything since has been the slow separation of a real phenomenon from an enormous amount of surrounding nonsense.
Dream Research
REM sleep is found across mammals and birds, and rats appear to replay the routes they ran that day. Whether any of that involves experience is a question the evidence cannot reach.
Dream Research
For decades REM sleep and dreaming were treated as the same thing. Patients whose brain damage abolished one while leaving the other intact showed that they are not.
Symbols & Meaning
They make up a small fraction of dream content, they frequently feature people the dreamer has no waking interest in, and reading them as statements of desire is the commonest error people make about their own dreams.
Dream Research
The strangest feature of dreams is not their content but the dreamer's complete failure to notice it. That failure has a location in the brain and a plausible explanation.
Nightmares & Disorders
Ordinary distressing memories lose their charge over successive nights. In post-traumatic stress disorder they do not, and the failure appears to happen during REM sleep itself.
Sleep Science
Newborns spend half their sleep in REM. By eighty, slow-wave sleep has largely disappeared and the clock has moved forward by hours. Almost none of this is optional.
