Okay, I confess I’m starting to lose track.
It’s 11:18 pm here in D.C.. Which is 9:18 pm in Laramie and 5:18 pm in Waikiki. And no, I have no idea which time zone my body is on, much less my brain.
I mentioned this before, the new research on jet lag. See, the way sleep works is, a person spends the first part of the night in Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), which is the deep, healing sleep. Dreaming or Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep occurs only in brief periods between the sometimes two-hours-long stretches of SWS. As the night progresses, the proportions shift, with more time spent in REM sleep and less in SWS. This is why you usually wake from a dream in the mornings, and you dream more if you sleep in. It’s also why the afternoon nap can feel so deadly — that deep sleep can be hard to shake off.
So, for those who don’t care to link to the article, the upshot is, even though you may adjust to a new time zone and sleep during the ambient night, the parts of the brain that regulate the sleep cycle may be continuing on their regular schedule. So when I flew to Hawaii, that meant my usual dreaming time of, say, 2am to 6am, was shifted to 10pm to 2 am, skipping SWS altogether if I didn’t go to sleep before 10. Which, erm, I didn’t. Now, if I adjusted to Hawaii time, which, after nine days, I likely did, now my dream time is occurring from 8am to noon.
The interesting thing is, the studies showed that if you don’t get enough REM sleep for a while, you start to get REM intrusion — which means your brain clicks into REM state even when you’re awake.
Yeah.
You know that surreal, dreamlike feeling? There you are.
So it’s hard to say which state I’m in. We’ll choose “deprived” as an umbrella term. Soon I’ll be overstimulated. Which is worse?
You be the judge.