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[MINILIK SALSAWI]

In short:
Vivid and immersive dreams can create the perception of deeper sleep, new research suggests.

Researchers found that after being awakened from a vivid dream, people perceived their sleep as deeper even when they were actually in a lighter sleep stage.

What's next?
The study is part of a broader research project into whether dreams and the experience of sleep can be harnessed to help people with sleep disorders.

Have you ever woken from a dream that felt vividly real and thought, "Wow, I was in a really deep sleep"?

According to new research, published today in PLOS, the intensity of the dream could have affected your sense of sleep quality.

Study author Giulio Bernardi said the research showed that vivid and immersive dreams could create the perception of having slept deeply, even when their brain was in a lighter sleep state.

"Immersive dreams may contribute to your subjective sleep depth, and so probably also your sleep quality when you wake up in the morning," Dr Bernardi, a neuroscientist who works at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy) said.

This matters because your perception of sleep quality is a key determinant — along with sleep duration — in feeling like you've had a good night's sleep.

So why do we think we're sleeping more soundly if we have an engaging dream?

The four phases of sleep
Most people begin to feel tired in the evening for two reasons: our circadian rhythm; and homeostatic pressure — basically, the longer we stay awake, the more tired we get.

When we finally drift off to sleep, we cycle through stages of non-REM sleep (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

The lightest stage of sleep — N1 — happens first and takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

After that we transition through to N2 (deeper sleep) and N3 (the deepest phase of sleep characterised by slow brain waves), then REM sleep and back again.

READ FULL ARTICLE : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/202 ... /106406372