50% of the population sleeps about 7 hours a night, which leaves ample time for dreams or nightmares to follow one another in our subconscious. PasseportSanté invites you to learn more about their meaning.

The desire to interpret and understand dreams dates back to Greek mythology, when dreams were closely associated with deities. It is only relatively recently that empirical studies on the nature of dreams have been carried out. Despite the various researches and hypotheses put forward over the centuries, the role and importance of dreams remain uncertain.

The sleep period is divided into 5 distinct phases:

• THEfalling asleep is composed of two stages: drowsiness and drowsiness. Drowsiness is characterized by loss of muscle tone and slowing of the heart rate, before dozing off.
• Le light sleep accounts for 50% of full sleep time for a night. During this phase, the person is dozing, but is very sensitive to external stimuli.
• Le deep slow sleep is the phase of settling into deep sleep. This is when brain activity slows down the most.
• Le deep sleep is the most intense phase of the period of rest, during which the whole body (muscles and brain) is asleep. This phase is the most important of sleep because it allows you to recover the accumulated physical fatigue. This is also when sleepwalking can occur.
• Le paradoxical sleep is called so because at this point the brain emits fast waves, the person’s eyes are moving, and breathing becomes irregular. While these signs may suggest that the person is about to wake up, they are still in a deep sleep. Although dreams can occur during other phases such as light sleep, they mostly occur during the REM phase of sleep, which takes up about 25% of the time you are resting.