1. Sleep Everyone’s favorite pastime

2. Catching some zzzzzzs Are you aware that you spend one third of your life asleep? Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why do some of us have trouble getting to sleep or experience nightmares?

3. The Stages of Sleep Sleep researchers have discovered that we sleep in stages. There are 4 stages of sleep

4. Stage 1 Stage 1 is the stage of lightest sleep

5. Stage 1 In stage 1 your pulse slows A BIT, And your muscles relax, but your breathing becomes uneven and your brainwaves grow irregular. If you were to awake you would think you were just drifting. This phase lasts for about ten minutes.

6. Stage 2

7. Stage 2 During stage 2 sleep, brain wave activities begin to get irregular. We’re soundly asleep at this stage, but we may not think were actually sleeping.

8. Example: My wife wakes me up while I’m sleeping in front of the television all the time to tell me that I’m snoring, but I always tell her that I wasn’t sleeping. I must have been snoring while awake.

9. Stage 3

10. Your eyes roll slowly from side to side. You fall into an even deeper sleep. We spend about an hour and a half in stage 3.

11. Stage 4

12. Stage 4 During stage 4, our eyes begin to move back and forth very rapidly, which is called rapid eye movement. REM Now were in REM sleep, the sub-stage in which the brain is active, but were asleep.

13. R.E.M. We Dream in REM Sleep. After we reach REM sleep, about an hour and a half into the whole sleep process, the rest of the night is characterized by alternating periods of REM sleep and Non-REM sleep (activity seen in Stages 1,2, and 3).

14. Why do we Sleep? I don’t necessarily know why other people sleep, but I usually sleep because I’m tired. For the most part, researchers still don’t know why we sleep, but some believe it has a restorative function.

15. Research that looks at the effects of the lack of sleep, or sleep deprivation, suggests that we engage in sleep so that our body can restore what was lost or damaged during our waking hours.