Dr. Michael Breus

And we'll get back to your meditation in just a second.

That's stage one.

Stage two represents literally 50% of the night, literally half the night you're in stage two.

Stage three and four, which is combined together and called deep sleep, we talked a little bit about, but once again, that is your physical restoration.

That is the wake up and feel great sleep.

That is the, again, car into the body shop, pulling out the dents and the scratches and things like that.

Then there's REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement sleep.

And this is your mental restoration.

So this is where you move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.

You kind of create this organizational substructure like a filing cabinet for data, right?

So data is coming in all day through your eyes, through your ears, through your nose, and through your mouth.

If you want to remember something the next day, REM sleep is what helps you do that.

So REM sleep allows that information to cross over

and be more permanently attached inside of your brain.

It's pretty interesting, but that process of moving over, we call dreaming.

Interesting, right?

Now, here's what's fascinating, is you can dream in any stage of sleep, but your dreams are different depending upon which stage you are in.

So if you're in any one of the first stages I talked about, one, two, three, or four, your dreams are very procedural.

What do I mean by that?

You're riding a bicycle.