I thought I'd put this here.It is a good baseline article on sleep and it's interesting in relation to stages of awareness,re:astral travel/lucidity/OBE.The links on the page to sleep disorders are useful too.It just goes to show,though that the scientific study of sleeping is still in it's infancy. We still have much to learn to begin to understand it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
An article on sleep
Thanks for posting, Eretik. Very interesting indeed 
. Sleep is a strange creature, the complexities of which I'm all too familiar with! I could probably take 'sleep problems' as my specialist subject on Mastermind I have that many 
.
One thing that's been bothering me as of late is how vivid my dreams have become. It's important to understand at this point that I often lucid dream and that I only do it when I 'wan't to.. i.e. I have prepared before I sleep, so that when I dream I slip into the lucid state. I've been able to do it almost my entire life, since I had a terrible nightmare when I was young (around 3 or 4 years of age). A friend of my mother told me about how 'some people can control their dreams, and turn bad things into good things'.. It obviously left a lasting impression, as I've never encountered a bad dream since, and have developed the ability to be able to control my dreams entirely.
However, alongside the more vivid dreams I've been having.. I've also been slipping into a lucid state without even trying to. It's not something I enjoy, unlike my concious efforts at lucid dreaming, since it feels equivalent to how it'd be if suddenly I realised my entire waking reality was a dream. My non-lucid dreams are so vivid I have no problem at all fully believing them as a reality when they're occuring.. So to suddenly realise it's all false comes as a shock.
More worrying for me is just how difficult it is to rouse me from these dreams if I haven't slipped into the lucid state. I can set five alarms, only to completely ignore them.. Or for them to seamlessly become a part of my dream, in which I reach over to the phone and turn them all off before the other four have a chance to sound. Often the lucid state comes after this, after a very prolonged period of sleep.. I'll suddenly realise that I'm still dreaming, and then do everything I can to end the dream. It seems ridiculously difficult to 'wake myself up' from within the dream.. And I genuinely think that if it weren't for the fact I become conciously aware that I'm dreaming, I'd continue to sleep for days.
All jokes aside, my sleep problems are really starting to bother me lately. If I have no express reason to wake up, I simply don't.. And can quite happily sleep seamlessly for more than 13 hours (not something I am happy or proud of). This then only serves to worsen my insomnia, which often keeps me awake until well after 4am.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting this - Just felt like it, really.. If anyone has any thoughts or comments though, let me know. Sorry for rambling again guys! Haha.
Elem
. Sleep is a strange creature, the complexities of which I'm all too familiar with! I could probably take 'sleep problems' as my specialist subject on Mastermind I have that many .One thing that's been bothering me as of late is how vivid my dreams have become. It's important to understand at this point that I often lucid dream and that I only do it when I 'wan't to.. i.e. I have prepared before I sleep, so that when I dream I slip into the lucid state. I've been able to do it almost my entire life, since I had a terrible nightmare when I was young (around 3 or 4 years of age). A friend of my mother told me about how 'some people can control their dreams, and turn bad things into good things'.. It obviously left a lasting impression, as I've never encountered a bad dream since, and have developed the ability to be able to control my dreams entirely.
However, alongside the more vivid dreams I've been having.. I've also been slipping into a lucid state without even trying to. It's not something I enjoy, unlike my concious efforts at lucid dreaming, since it feels equivalent to how it'd be if suddenly I realised my entire waking reality was a dream. My non-lucid dreams are so vivid I have no problem at all fully believing them as a reality when they're occuring.. So to suddenly realise it's all false comes as a shock.
More worrying for me is just how difficult it is to rouse me from these dreams if I haven't slipped into the lucid state. I can set five alarms, only to completely ignore them.. Or for them to seamlessly become a part of my dream, in which I reach over to the phone and turn them all off before the other four have a chance to sound. Often the lucid state comes after this, after a very prolonged period of sleep.. I'll suddenly realise that I'm still dreaming, and then do everything I can to end the dream. It seems ridiculously difficult to 'wake myself up' from within the dream.. And I genuinely think that if it weren't for the fact I become conciously aware that I'm dreaming, I'd continue to sleep for days
.All jokes aside, my sleep problems are really starting to bother me lately. If I have no express reason to wake up, I simply don't.. And can quite happily sleep seamlessly for more than 13 hours (not something I am happy or proud of). This then only serves to worsen my insomnia, which often keeps me awake until well after 4am.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting this - Just felt like it, really.. If anyone has any thoughts or comments though, let me know
. Sorry for rambling again guys! Haha.Elem
That's what I'm looking for Elem,others experiences,we can all be of help to each other here. I am an Insomniac with lots of interesting [ahem] sleep problems and situations. Sometimes I go hypersomnic too [that's the fancy name for sleeping excessively or deeply,as you describe,I see patterns in my behaviour]I 'll be back later, share mine too. Got kids stuff etc. to do just now.lol.