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Originally Posted by ahimel  I'd be interested to know your source on that. My understanding is that when study groups were allowed very little sleep, but were allowed to complete their REM cycles, they functioned almost as well as if they'd gotten a full night's sleep. |
There is one thing that you might not have realized, and that is that in order to acheive REM sleep, you have to first pass through all the stages of NREM sleep, so it's impossible to judge which one is more important that way (since there's no way to get *only* REM sleep). In fact, since the body strives for NREM sleep first, that would suggest that it is more important than REM. Indeed, studies have shown that when the body does not get one or the other type of sleep, it compensates by getting more of that sleep stage the next time. So it would seem that they are equally important.
As for the information on polyphasic sleeping, as mentioned in my last post, my source is
Why We Nap by Claudio Stampi. It is out of print, so you'll probably have to go to the Library of Commerce to get it (that's what I had to do since most libraries don't have it).