Rapid eye movement sleep resemblance to waking life), and incorporation of instinctual themes. Sometimes they include elements of the dreamer's recent experience taken directly from episodic memory. By one estimate, 80% of dreams occur during REM. Hobson and McCarley proposed that the PGO waves characteristic of “phasic” REM might supply the visual cortex and forebrain with electrical excitement which amplifies the hallucinatory aspects of dreaming. However, people woken up during sleep do not report significantly more bizarre dreams during phasic REMS, compared to tonic REMS. Another possible relationship between the two phenomena could be that the higher threshold for sensory interruption during REM sleep
Rapid eye movement sleep sleepers during a REM phase is a common experimental method for obtaining dream reports; 80% of neurotypical people can give some kind of dream report under these circumstances. Sleepers awakened from REM tend to give longer more narrative descriptions of the dreams they were experiencing, and to estimate the duration of their dreams as longer. Lucid dreams are reported far more often in REM sleep. (In fact these could be considered a hybrid state combining essential elements of REM sleep and waking consciousness.) The mental events which occur during REM most commonly have dream hallmarks including narrative structure, convincingness (experiential