Dr. Michael Grandner

The second cycle, you'll have a little bit less deep and a little more stage two and a little more REM.

By your third cycle, you might have no deep left.

And it's all just stage two in REM.

Maybe a little stage one interspersed in there if you wake up.

And the REM episodes get longer.

The dreams get more interesting.

That's why the dreams in the first half of the night, you probably won't remember them anyway.

But if you did, they're usually a little more boring.

But the dreams at the end of the night are the cool ones.

The ones with the stories and the characters and the blurring of reality and emotion.

In the later parts of the night, like nightmares, nightmares to a sleep scientist, a nightmare is a dream that wakes you up.

That's the definition of sort of a nightmare in our world.

A dream that is so where the emotion is so powerful, it overcomes that, that process.

Sorry, if this is sleep stages, you go through these during the night and in REM sleep, it takes those important experiences that you, that you segregated in deep sleep, where you got rid of all the junk, kept the good stuff and REM sleep, what the dreams are doing is you're witnessing the brain rewire itself using what was left.

So basically the dreams are, among other things, essentially what's happening is, okay, here's what's left.

How do I, what do I do with this?

How is it, how does it connect to other things?

How do I sort it?

How do I file it?

How do I process it?