Make Sure that You Get Enough Sleep
Whether you are under stress or not, you need to get enough sleep. Without sleep, hallucinations start to occur and after around 10 days with no sleep at all death can become a real threat. On average, a newborn baby spends almost two –thirds of its time asleep, that by the age of 4 or 5 the proportion has dropped to under half and that the average adult sleeps for about 7 hours of the 24 hours.
Some experts believe that adults who regularly sleep more than 7 hours are doing themselves harm because their body processes are becoming too sluggish. However, anything between 4 and 11 hours a night is quite normal. Your lifestyle and constitution are the things that affect how much you should sleep.
The mystery is why we need to sleep. The most acceptable theory at the moment is that input of sense data to the brain has to stop for several hours a day to allow the brain to rationalize, disperse, and store the day’s intake. Imagine how much information the brain takes in during the day. Everything that you see, hear, touch, and smell may stir associations in the subconscious. If all these things are left unsorted, we can describe to condition of the brain just like a mail-sorting office without any staffs.
We are not certain, but the process of rationalization that goes on in the brain seems to be closely related to dreaming, and dreams may represent the process itself. The dreams also likely to be useful to express parts of waking urges that has to be repressed for social or cultural reasons. Erotic fantasy dream is an obvious example. Other dreams are probably prompted by sense data that is too strong to block out, even by sleep. An example of this kind of dream is when we dream of bells when our alarm clock is ringing.
There are several levels of sleep. The levels are shallow, deep, and paradoxical. Shallow sleep is the first stage of sleep. In shallow sleep, breathing is light and the body slows down. People often change position in this sleep stage. Thirty changes or more are normal in one night’s sleep. In deep sleep, the body is thoroughly relaxed, growth hormones are relaxed, and the body replaces dead cells. In paradoxical sleep, the level of relaxation is much the same as in deep sleep but the brain is much more alert. Breathing becomes irregular and the eyes can be seen moving rapidly under the eyelids. It seems that in paradoxical sleep stage the dreaming occurs more profusely. It is in paradoxical sleep also that sexual dreams become prominent. A cycle of shallow-deep-paradoxical sleep normally repeats 4 or 5 times throughout the night. The greatest objection of using sleeping pills (beside the possibility of addiction) is that they appear to derange this pattern and reduce the quantity of paradoxical sleep.
Apparently, babies spend up to 50 percent of their sleeping time in the paradoxical stage, while adults spend around 20 percent.