There are two main types of sleep. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is when you do most active dreaming & Non-REM (NREM) sleep which consists of four stages of deeper and deeper sleep. Each sleep stage is important for overall quality sleep, but deep sleep and REM sleep are especially vital.
A typical night of sleep follows this pattern:
Stage 1 (Drowsiness) - Stage 1 lasts just five or ten minutes. Eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down, and you are easily awakened.
Stage 2 (Light Sleep) - Eye movements stop, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases.
Stages 3 & 4 (Deep Sleep) - You’re difficult to awaken, and if you are awakened, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. Deep sleep allows the brain to go on a little vacation needed to restore the energy we expend during our waking hours. Blood flow decreases to the brain in this stage, and redirects itself towards the muscles, restoring physical energy. Research also shows that immune functions increase during deep sleep.
REM sleep (Dream Sleep) – At about 70 to 90 minutes into your sleep cycle, you enter REM sleep. You usually have three to five REM episodes per night. This stage is associated with processing emotions, retaining memories and relieving stress. Breathing is rapid, irregular and shallow, the heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, males may have penile erections, and females may have clitoral enlargement.
From stage 1 to stage 4 is about an hour, you spend about 30-40 mins in deep sleep then come out of deep sleep into REM which usually ends the first full cycle after 2 hours of sleep. You then go through another similarly intensive cycle which last another 2 hours.
Quote from American Phychological Association: During REM sleep, the brain busily replenishes neurotransmitters that organize neural networks essential for remembering, learning, performance and problem solving. Conversely, depriving the brain of sleep makes you clumsy, stupid and unhealthy. Why? During REM sleep, the brain transfers short-term memories in the motor cortex to the temporal lobe to become long-term memories. Research suggests sleep spindles fire away as the temporal lobe makes sense of new information and stores it in long-term memory. Sleep spindles are one to two second bursts of brain waves that rapidly wax and wane at strong frequencies, so-called for the spike image they form on an EEG reading which occur during REM sleep.
Within the first 4 hours of sleep you would normally go between REM and deep sleep twice, so it may depend on your bodys ability to fully recover in that 4 hour (2 REM stages) sleep cycle and whether youre able to achive the same during your second 4 hour sleep cycle which will ultimately determine if your proposal is feasible. Sleep benefits four key areas they are:
Immune system.
Nervous system.
Brain cellular repair.
Hormone release.
If you really want to try to see if your body is up to the 2x4 sleep pattern, try it and if any of the above mentioned areas start to become affected if you start to get sick, you start to forget stuff frequently your body is always in pain or something associated with the 4 points above then I would say your body ain't up for it.
Hope that helps.
