To ensure your best sleep possible, it is important to sleep and wake according to your body’s rhythm.

What is your best sleep possible? Our resident sleep expert Dr. Christopher Drake recommends sleeping and waking according to your body’s clock. This means falling asleep around 10:oo or 11:00 at night and rising around 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning. Not only is this in sync with your circadian rhythm, but also it ensures the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep.

Located in the Hypothalamus part of the brain, your body’s circadian rhythm is a cycle of biological processes that include among other things, body temperature, hormonal function and gastric activity.

“Your body’s clock is a little longer than 24 hours,” said our sleep expert Dr. Christopher Drake. You can keep it on track with light in the morning and lack of light in the evening. Too much nighttime light can disturb Melatonin secretion, the chemical the body releases to make you sleepy.

While you can not significantly change your sleep and wake schedule, it is a cycle that can be influenced by outside factors, such as jet lag, stress, hormones, pregnancy or overnight shift work. If such disruptions become chronic, they can eventually impair your memory, reduce your ability to concentrate, and possibly affect your overall health.

If you find yourself out of sync, your goal should be to establish sleep-wake patterns that will “reset” your body’s biological clock. For example, if you work nights, you will need to trick your body into thinking it is nighttime when you go to bed. Heavy curtains, a sleep mask and settling down to sleep at regular times each day will help. If the problem becomes ongoing, you may want to seek help from a sleep specialist.

The Henry Ford Health System offers sleep tips for shift workers and the Center for Circadian Medicine offers advice on how to gauge your body clock.

Wes: I keep having the same dream almost every night and sometimes multiple times like tonight. I wake up and am unable to move but I can see and hear everything around me, then I will start hallucinating someone staring at me or standing around me and I cant move. I struggle so hard to force myself to wake up and when I go back to sleep it just happens again. It feels like I’m wide-awake and this problem has followed me for four years to several different houses. I also never told anyone about it and the other day my girlfriend told me about these scary dreams she was having where she would wake up but would be unable to move. It sounds bizarre that we would share the same dream.

If there is any input you can give me to help this go away it would be greatly appreciated?

Dr. Drake: Hi Wes, when you experience this problem you are awake. What you are experiencing is actually a very well known phenomenon. Although it is difficult to determine from your brief description and without a formal assessment, the experience you are describing may be “recurrent sleep paralysis.”

This occurs when an individual partially awakens from a dream. Some elements of the dream state remain such as an inability to move (this is a normal part of REM/dream sleep – but we are usually asleep when it happens – this keeps us from acting out our dreams) and sometimes there are visual hallucinations (the vision of someone in your room). The experience usually lasts only a few minutes, but can be very frightening if you don’t know what is going on. The problem can be recurrent – happening multiple times per year, but usually not multiple times per week.

It can be a common experience (15-40%) in individuals who are sleep deprived (getting less than 7-8 hours of sleep per night), or who have very irregular sleep-wake patterns. There are no known complications, apart from anxiety over the episodes. The fact that you experience this sleep paralysis in conjunction with a recurring dream simply means the dream content is vivid/emotional enough to wake you up partially during the dream. An article in a recent issue of the New Yorker looks at the idea of treating nightmares like a sleep disorder would be treated.

If this experience is disturbing enough to you or is associated with excessive sleepiness and occurs on a very frequent basis it is something you should talk about with your doctor. Consider be referred to or finding a sleep specialist to determine if this is the only issue going on with your sleep or if there may be some additional problems related to this experience that warrant attention. Regardless of how you approach things from here, you should try to increase the amount of time you spend in bed to 8 hours per night.