“People of all ages pop awake in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep. One associates this phenomenon with anxiety if it happens in younger people, and no doubt that’s frequently the cause. But it also rhymes with what may be a natural pattern. Perhaps we’re meant to wake up. Perhaps broken sleep doesn’t mean our sleep is broken, because another sleep awaits.
And if we think of those middle-of-the-night awakenings as meant to be, Wehr told me, perhaps we should use them differently, as some of our forebears did when they’d wake up in the night bathed in prolactin, a hormone that kept them relaxed and serene. “They were kind of in an altered state, maybe a third state of consciousness you usually don’t experience in modern life, unless you’re a meditator. And they would contemplate their dreams.”
Night awakenings, he went on to explain, tend to happen as we’re exiting a REM cycle, when our dreams are most intense. “We’re not having an experience that a lot of our ancestors had of waking up and maybe processing, or musing, or let’s even say ‘being informed’ by dreams.”
CNMRI: Neurology, Sleep Medicine, MRI 