Dr. Michael Breus

You're in the kitchen cooking something.

You're walking on a trail, right?

But REM dreams are very creative.

So as an example, you could be walking on a trail in non-REM and then once your body switches to REM, all of a sudden you look to your right and there's a dragon walking with you, right?

Or your best friend or your grandmother who passed away 30 years ago, right?

fantastical things happen during REM dreams, whereas procedural things happen during non-REM dreams.

But that's kind of how the stages work themselves out.

Now what's interesting is the stages are different based on what we call sleep cycles.

So a cycle is where you go from wake to stage one to stage two, stage three, four, back to stage two into REM.

That little dance maneuver is considered a sleep cycle.

Roughly 90 minutes is what the average human does.

Most people have six of these cycles.

When you start to look at it and you look at these 90 minute cycles, right, then that's where we start to understand more about how sleep works.

So as an example, let's say that you have five 90 minute cycles, right?

So five 90 minute cycles is how many hours?

Seven and a half hours.

So guess what?

Eight hours is the myth.

Eight hours is a myth, man.

So many people try to force themselves to get, the math doesn't even work.