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Why your body jerks before you fall asleep...
If you have ever wondered why people’s arms and legs twitch suddenly as they are drifting off to sleep, our resident psychologist Tom Stafford has the answer. As we give up our bodies to sleep, sudden twitches escape our brains, causing our arms and legs to jerk. Some people are startled by them, others are embarrassed. Me, I am fascinated by these twitches, known as hypnic jerks. Nobody knows for sure what causes them, but to me they represent the side effects of a hidden battle for control in the brain that happens each night on the cusp between wakefulness and dreams. Normally we are paralysed while we sleep. Even during the most vivid dreams our muscles stay relaxed and still, showing little sign of our internal excitement. Events in the outside world usually get ignored: not that I’d recommend doing this but experiments have shown that even if you sleep with your eyes taped open and someone flashes a light at you it is unlikely that it will affect your dreams. But the door between the dreamer and the outside world is not completely closed. Two kinds of movements escape the dreaming brain, and they each have a different story to tell. Brain battle The most common movements we make while asleep are rapid eye-movements. When we dream, our eyes move according to what we are dreaming about. If, for example, we dream we are watching a game of tennis our eyes will move from left to right with each volley. These movements generated in the dream world escape from normal sleep paralysis and leak into the real world. Seeing a sleeping persons' eyes move is the strongest sign that they are dreaming. Hypnic jerks aren't like this. They are most common in children, when our dreams are most simple and they do not reflect what is happening in the dream world - if you dream of riding a bike you do not move your legs in circles. Instead, hypnic jerks seem to be a sign that the motor system can still exert some control over the body as sleep paralysis begins to take over. Rather than having a single “sleep-wake” switch in the brain for controlling our sleep (i.e. ON at night, OFF during the day), we have two opposing systems balanced against each other that go through a daily dance, where each has to wrest control from the other.
Are you interested in this issue? Do you twitch when falling asleep? Do you think this is abnormal? Does the article helpful to you?
I posted this article because this issue really worries me. A lot of my friends behave in this manner while asleep. It's a bit scary, you'll agree), but after reading the article I realized that this is not a disease and not a pain, it's just body movements))"exhale")
I often move in my dreams too. Before reading this article, I had no idea why it is so. But I've heard that when we dream,our eyes move according to what we are dreaming about. It is a really interesting topic. So, thank you for giving to us this useful information. [size=7][/size]
Thanks you for this an informative article. I am intersted in this question. And it was useful for me to learn about movements in our dreams! ;)I often move in my dream. But i didn't know why i move. Now i know it!!!
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