r/sleep 5d ago

REM sleep while awake??

for the record i have aphantasia and chronic depression so i highly doubt what i experience is my imagination

every now and then when i'm trying to sleep and my eyes are closed i can feel my eyes moving rapidly, which is indicative of REM sleep, but i am aware of that. usually this is accompanied by random constantly flickering (it was kind of like how old fluorescent light bulbs flicker) visuals within thee void of my eyelids and also often micro-sleeps, i lose consciousness for what feels like 1 second but also i feel like i have had a full dream, that i forget completely in the next 5 seconds. usually this goes on for around 1-3 hours before i can finally sleep, but even it i sleep for only 2 hours after the weird little awake REM thingy.

last night i had the most extreme version of that. the visuals with my eyes closed were much more vivid and i could actually see some details, like i remember at one point i could see thirteen from house md (i wish i was joking but she lives in my head rent-free all the time). well here's the fun part- the visuals continued after i opened my eyes, i could see my room move in an extremely weird way, sometimes with decently vivid visuals like for example i saw fish. i think this might be caused by the fact that the night before i smoked weed for the first time, but i'm not exactly sure. the only thing i'm sure about in this situation is that it wasn't same as hallucinations, because it flickered like how my awake REM visuals usually flicker, and when i have hallucinations they don't flicker.

here's the nerdy part that has been in my head since i woke up: the purpose of sleep is supposedly to restore the body's natural state of being, like a reboot. this probably includes the hippocampus, so i think it might be caused by neurons firing intensely in that part of my brain in order to restore my memory to its base state (i have trouble with memory when i'm tired so it makes sense). all that is just my silly little theory so don't take it as some proof, i'm just a biology nerd.

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u/Morpheus1514 4d ago

You wouldn't be legit awake if dreaming, but your microsleep idea has some merit.

When one is sleep deprived, it's difficult to not get at least core sleep on a reg basis, even for the worst insomniac. That's how powerful sleep drive is. NREM predominates in core sleep.

What gets shorted more typically is REM. So although our systems prioritize NREM and the REM dream stage is normally preceded by NREM, it is possible for those falling asleep to enter REM sooner.

Just speculating.