I have heard that you will much more easily remember a dream if you wake up during REM sleep - which technically means that the hours you sleep should be divisible by 1.5 (1.5 hours, 3 hours, 4.5 hours etc).
Now I was wondering - just how important is this?
And how exact do you need to be?
I have no idea how long it takes for me to fall asleep, so it’s really hard to plan ahead exactly when I should wake up.
Or can I just wake up “somewhere around those hours”?
Because last night I slept about 4 hours, and I had almost no dream recall that night - maybe because I woke up between two REM periods…?
From what I know, REM periods are getting longer at the end of the night approaching morning, often I read it is good to wake up after 6 hours of sleep, but it also depends on how long you sleep normally.
It’s not quite every 1.5 hours. Generally the beginning of the night is for deep sleep and the REM cycles are very short. Try to time it for when you might be starting a longer REM phase. Let’s look at a chart.
As you can see, the longer you sleep the more REM you will have. 5-6 hours seems to be best, but it varies a little from person to person, so experiment some by waking up at different times. You an also try to use autosuggestion to time in correlation to when you normally wake up after REM.
Waking up right after REM is also good. We do that normally, as you can see by the little lines at the end of the REM periods on the chart above. The thing is how much do we wake up. Most of the times these tiny wake ups can barely have any consciousness, enough only to change positions and go back to sleep. With auto-suggestion you can practice paying more attention to become more aware during these awakenings. Some people have been able to train themselves to wake up after avery single REM period to right down their dreams.
I’ve noticed that I’m pretty good with auto-suggestions, and few times I woke up using auto-suggestion for WBTB, and some crazy, but cool things happened… And I woke up around 4:30am and 5am… That’s about six hours of sleep, sometimes more…
