Sleeping Disorders

Sleep Apnea

• A person stops breathing during their sleep
• wake up momentarily, gasps for air, then falls back to sleep
• very common, especially in heavy males 
• can be fatal

Night Terrors

• sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified
• occurs in stage 4, not REM, often not remembered 

Insomnia

• persistent problems falling asleep
• effects 10% of population

Narcolepsy 

• suffers from sleeplessness and may fall asleep at unpredictable or inappropriate times
• directly into REM sleep
• less than .001% of population suffer from this

Sleepwalking (Somnambulism) 

• sleep walking affects an estimated 10% of all humans at least once in their lives 
• often occurs in deep non-REM sleep 
• (stage 3 and 4) early in the night

Dreams

• a sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person's mind

Manifest Content

• remembered story line of a dream

Latent Content

• underlying meaning of a dream

Information-Processing Theory

• dreams act to sort out and understand the memories that you experience that day
• REM sleep does increase after stressful events 

Activation- Synthesis Theory

• during the night our brainstem releases random neural activity, dreams may be a way to make sense of that activity