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The characteristics of REM sleep consistently contain a similar set of features. While dreaming, people regularly falsely believe that they are awake unless they implement lucidity. Dreams contain multimodal pseudo-perceptions; sometimes any or all sensory modalities are present, but most often visual and motoric. [9]
Dreams have a foresight function, enabling us to find a way out of an immediate conflict. [I 2] To reduce the polysemy of the term, Jung sometimes speaks of the "intuitive function" of dreams. [G 3] This prospective function is not in fact a premonitory dream, but teaches the dreamer a path to follow. [2]
The cycle of waking-NREM-REM sleep is essential to mental health of mammals. It has been shown through experimentation that animals subjected to inability to enter REM sleep show an immediate attempt to quickly enter REM stages and long-term effects on motor coordination and habitual motor habits, eventually leading to the death of the animal.
Some researchers argue that the perpetuation of a complex brain process such as REM sleep indicates that it serves an important function for the survival of mammalian and avian species. It fulfills important physiological needs vital for survival to the extent that prolonged REM sleep deprivation leads to death in experimental animals.
REM sleep, also known as paradoxical sleep, represents a smaller portion of total sleep time. It is the main occasion for dreams (or nightmares), and is associated with desynchronized and fast brain waves, eye movements, loss of muscle tone, [18] and suspension of homeostasis. [19]
Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function. It is not known where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind.
Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...
Research into dreams includes exploration of the mechanisms of dreaming, the influences on dreaming, and disorders linked to dreaming. Work in oneirology overlaps with neurology and can vary from quantifying dreams to analyzing brain waves during dreaming, to studying the effects of drugs and neurotransmitters on sleeping or dreaming.