Where is the line drawn between pre-dream imagery and actual dreams. I’m asking because i was just shocked completly awake from a very disturbing dream, and I’m absolutely sure that I couldn’t have had time to enter REM sleep. Also, I have just gone to bed and barely closed my eyes, I didn’t wake up in after having asleep for a while. It was very strange/scary. I saw a father watching to children where his driveway meets the road, I saw this from the elevated perspective of my car. When one of the two children started walking into the middle of the road, it felt like I was driving up on him, as I was aproaching him at about the rate I would if I were driving in a residential area. I remember expecting the child to stop and return to his father, but he kept walking out into the road. I was shocked awake right before I would have hit the child. I’m wondering how quickly can a person enter into a dream. It was especially strange, as since I’ve been interested in dreaming/LDing i’ve been observing how i fall asleep, and i’ve never fallen asleep that quickly before. Not that I have trouble falling asleep, it just seemed like about ten seconds after I closed my eyes, I noticed random thoughts popping up, and then suddenly I was in the dream i described above. While this is normall, it always takes me longer, this seemed almost instantaneous
Hi tomatofarmer.
The line between HI / pre-dream images and actual dreams is a thin one. Often dreams start from HI and the likes. The dream you had was probably no longer HI but already in the nREM dream phase (where we can actually have very realistic dreams happening).
Hi Tomatofarmer !
Did you change your sleep schedule before you had this dream? Were you specially exhausted when you went to sleep? When did this dream happen? Was it when you went to bed in the evening, or during a WBTB?
just a question! do you consider yourself to be a freakin time-bomb? a potential killer? PM me if you feel like doing so. not wanting to make you go further with that kind of thought but…
It once happened to me when i was very exausted!-going instantaneously to REM sleep.
To baisillus, no, there was nothing especially different about that night, it happened right when I was first going to sleep. I always have a look at my clock before I close my eyes and let sleep do it’s thing, and the whole thing experience spanned about ten minutes or so. From what i’ve read here, and from “Exploring the world of Lucid Dreamin” I thought when you first go to sleep it takes longer to get to the dream stage of REM? I guess this must not be a hard and fast rule. To Phatidico, freakin time bomb, no, potential killer, well, aren’t we all? Put in the right situation anyone could be a killer. Also, if I was some kind of psychopathic killer like I think maybe you’re describing, why would a dream of killing someone bother me? If anything, it’s me telling myself not to drive so fast maybe, and telling myself in a way that would have the most impact. I tell you, I didn’t sleep another wink that night…
And thank you guys for responding to my post! I thought maybe no one wanted to touch it or something…
Hypnagogic pictures are attempts of the brain to enter REM sleep, which is, contradict to what most LDers believe, the default protocol in sleep. The long continous wakefulness however, as a result of our monophasic sleep, makes it very difficult. The reason is that the need for deep sleep (which increases with wakefulness in an exponential manner) has a greater priority than REM sleep. This is, I belive, why WBTB works.
If HI are part of the attempt of the brain to enter REM, why do we have HI while falling asleep in the evening while REM only seems to start 1 hour or so after falling asleep?
From my understanding, HI occur at the onset of sleep and they have also been recorded to occur at the onset of REM.
I think it might have something to do with a certain level of alpha activity on the brain at the time…?
Hi Xetrov,
When the circadian process is at its right phase the brain try to enter REM sleep. There are a couple of fixed windows (for example at around noon) when REM sleep propensity is very high, thus REM latency is low enough for easy WILDing. This basic circadian process is modulated by the well known 90-110 minutes ultradian rythm making the daily pattern of REM-propensity more complex.
During continous wakefulness the need for synchronous or NREM sleep build up gradually manifesting as “sleep pressure.” This is a scale like process (called homeostatic lol… sorry for all these procesesses).
It’s very interesting that at regular bed time the circadian phase is not favorable for sleep, and similarly, just before regular wake time, the circadian process propagates sleep. These counteracting tendencies are told to be responsible for the stabilization of monophasic sleep.
It’s true that the circadian phase promotes REM sleep at regular bed time (hence the hypnagogics), but homeostatic process has greater priority, thus, after a possible demo of dreams we quickly fall into the deepest sleep stage. During the night sleep sleep pressure dissipates. But at mornings we can easily fall asleep again because the circadian phase is favorable for sleep.
Thanks for explaining popov 