I downloaded this nifty little app on my iPhone that charts your sleep cycles for you throughout the night. You set the app to run before falling asleep and you place your phone on the bed near you (but not so close that you'd roll on it or knock it off the bed). As you sleep, the phone records your movements and generates your sleep cycle chart.

Of course this is just an approximation of your true sleep cycles. To get a real look at your sleep cycles, you'd have to be hooked up to an EEG to monitor your brainwaves. Then you'd really know when you are in stage 1, 2, 3, 4, or REM sleep.

The app by sensing your movements approximates the cycles, but is really more of an indication of if you are sleeping or awake. We actually don't spend very much time in deep sleep and as we get towards morning most of our time is in REM sleep, but the graph doesn't accurately illustrate those differences (again, because it isn't based on brain waves). The info with the app doesn't make it explicit, but when we are deeply asleep as well as during REM sleep we move very little. Multiple times per night as we come back up to the low stages of sleep we briefly wake up (this is when we shift around); many times we don't remember all of these little wake ups.

And so the app is measuring when you aren't moving around in bed and when you are. Thus the real information is a comparison of sleeping (what they call deep sleep) and the spikes into awake. I ignore the dreaming category on the graph because I dream A LOT and if that were truly picked up, the graph would be constantly in that realm. The designers seem to put dreaming near awake with the assumption that we'll be moving some when dreaming, more than deep sleep and less than awake. But that's not really true, the body is mostly paralyzed during dreams (mostly and there are exceptions) so that we don't act out our dreams.

Regardless of its inaccuracies, I like the app. I think it is a cool to look at in the morning and see a visual confirmation that indeed I was awake around 3am. It is also interesting to see that about an hour or so before the alarm goes off, I'm often restless (anticipation? dread?). Kevin downloaded the app and we're going to compare our sleep cycles to see how much we are disturbing each other (haha!!). We're also experimenting with his creating a little pocket on the side of the bed to hold the phone instead of laying to directly on the upper corner of the mattress.