SLEEP AND DREAMS (UNIT 9)

UNIT 9

SLEEP AND DREAMS

 

Read the passage.

“Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,

Beloved from pole to pole.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a famous British poet, wrote these words over 100 years ago. Most people would agree with him. Sleep is very important to humans; the average person spends 220,000 hours of a lifetime sleeping. Until about thirty years ago, no one knew much about sleep. Then doctors and scientists began doing research in sleep laboratories. They have learned a great deal by studying people as they sleep, but there is still much that they don’t understand. 

Scientists study the body characteristics that change during sleep, such as body temperature, brain waves, blood pressure, breathing, and heartbeat. They also study rapid eye movement (REM). These scientists have learned that there is a kind of sleep with REM and another kind with no rapid eye movement (NREM). 

NREM is divided into three stages. In stage one, when you start to go to sleep, you have a pleasant floating feeling. A sudden noise can wake you up. In stage two, you sleep more deeply, and a noise will probably not wake you. In stage three, which you reach in less than thirty minutes, the brain waves are less active and stretched out. Then, within another half hour, you reach REM sleep. This stage might last an hour and a half and is the time when you dream. For the rest of the night, REM and NREM alternate.

Body movement during sleep occurs just before the REM stage. The average person moves about thirty times during sleep each night. 

Sleep is a biological need, but your brain never really sleeps. It is never actually blank. The things that were on your mind during the day are still there at night. They appear as dreams, which people have been discussing for centuries. At times people believed that dreams had magical powers or that they could tell the future. 

Sometimes dreams are terrifying, but they are usually a collection of scattered, confused thoughts. If you dream about something that is worrying you, you may wake up exhausted, sweating, and with a rapid heartbeat. Dreams have positive effects on our lives. During a dream, the brain may concentrate on a problem and look for different solutions. Also, people who dream during a good night’s sleep are more likely to remember newly learned skills. In other words, you learn better if you dream. 

Researchers say that normal people may have four or five REM periods of dreaming a night. The first one may begin only a half hour after falling asleep. Each period of dreaming is a little longer, the last one lasting up to an hour. Dreams also become more intense as the night continues. Nightmares usually occur towards dawn.

People dream in colour, but many don’t remember the colours. Certain people can control some of their dreams. They make sure they have a happy ending. Some people get relief from bad dreams by writing them down and then changing the negative stories or thoughts into positive ones on the written paper. Then they study the paper before they go to sleep again. 

Many people talk in their sleep, but it is usually just confused half sentences. They might feel embarrassed when someone tells them they were talking in their sleep, but they probably didn’t tell any secrets. 

Sleepwalking is most common among children. They usually grow out of it by the time they become adolescents. Children don’t remember that they were walking in their sleep, and they don’t usually wake up if the parent leads them back to bed.

There are lots of jokes about snoring, but it isn’t really funny. People snore because they have trouble breathing while they are asleep. Some snorers have a condition called sleep apnea. They stop breathing up to thirty or forty times an hour because the throat muscles relax too much and block the airway. 

Most people need from 7½ to 8½ hours of sleep a night, but this varies with individuals. Babies sleep eighteen hours, and old people need less sleep than younger people. If someone continually sleeps longer than normal for no apparent reason, there may be something physically or psychologically wrong. 

You cannot save hours of sleep the way you save money in the bank. If you have only 5 hours of sleep for three nights, you don’t need to sleep an extra 9 hours on the weekend. And it doesn’t do any good to sleep extra hours ahead of time when you know you will have to stay up late.

Sleep is important to humans. We spend a third of our lives sleeping, so we need to understand everything we can about sleep.

Sleep well! Sweet dreams!