Thread: How to artifically evoke REM phase?

You can sit on your sofa, fall asleep for an early afternoon or late morning nap and voila! REM will be right there just after a very brief light/falling asleep sleep phase.

Agree with gab.Last time i had a nap i was probably dreaming right away.I know because i woke up after the dream immediately,checked my time and it seemed i had been sleeping for 10 minutes.So i think i was in REM because i was instantly dreaming after getting to bed.

Funny thing is, I almost never even recall any dreams from naps unless they're "mini-sleeps," of 2+ hours or longer. And I've never gotten lucid during a nap dream. Perhaps because my naps almost always tend to be no earlier than mid-afternoon. Everyone's different.

Pro tip: wake up an hour or two earlier than your routine would prescribe. So if you usually get up at 6, set an alarm for 5 or 4 then when you lie down again you should enter REM right away.

Not all naps will land you into REM...

Let's say you routinely sleep from around 22:00 or 23:00 up to 6:00 or 7:00.

Sleep is relatively dense in REM from after ~4 or 5 hours of sleep (which is 3:00 - 4:00 in this example) up to about 12 hours from when you started sleeping (which would be in this example 11:00 or 12:00). So essentially, depending on individual variation you have 10 - 8 hours of relatively dense REM - which usually means that as long as you sleep from <~4 or 5 hours after the start of sleep> to <4-to-6 hours after your normal waking up time> the chances are very high for you to end up in REM.

Late afternoon naps as well as evening naps and the first few hours of night sleep are usually nearly devoid of REM and are far richer in deep sleep - which is why waking up from them leaves you in a groggy state. Waking up from REM doesn't.

Without completely modifying your own circadian rhythm you can't "artificially evoke" REM... In the normal human circadian rhythm (= 24 hours in a day with 7-8 hours of sleep), to get into REM it depends on which phase you enter sleep.

(As a disclaimer, it's worth noting that most of these numbers vary individually - which is why I wrote them as a range. The range is simply what is true for the majority of people - not necessarily everyone. For example, maybe some people can enter REM in evening naps too - but they are the exception to the rule...)

One can manipulate the math a bit with sleep debt. In the case of an afternoon nap, you might have more success if you shave 0.5-1 hour off your nighttime sleep and the make it up in the nap. Supplements too can alter sleep debt by suppressing REM, thus putting the balance of deep and REM off. The trouble is making such an irregular routine sustainable and fit with the rest of your waking life. And it's hardly as easy as pushing a button. But that's my 2 cents.

Yes, sisyphus, I agree. But as you said having such an irregular sleep routine becomes unsustainable after a couple of days... Even techniques like CAT that use a very similar adjustment require constant resetting, and cause sleep deprivation, irritability, and so on. This is exactly why I'll never try CAT - I'm sort of bound to do it by accident every so often (it happens that something ruins your sleep, like exams, etc.), but other than that it's just not worth it imo.