Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast.

Today we're going to be discussing a sleep disorder in which you act out your dreams and it is called REM sleep

behavioral disorder also known as RBD for short, Rem Sleep Behavior Disorder.

Rem Sleep Behavior Disorder is characterized by the physical enactment of dreams that occur during rapid eye movement sleep as we've mentioned

before on this show that is the stage of sleep from which we typically have very

vivid very vivid, very motoric, very movement-based dreams.

Taking a step back, we've also discussed probably in some of the very first episodes of this podcast what happens

during normal REM sleep in a healthy individual when we go into REM sleep, your brain, and specifically your brain stem

will paralyze the rest of your body so that you do not act out your dreams and this is a state of muscle paralysis.

Now the technical medical term for this is Atonia as we we've mentioned before, anything in medicine usually with the word A before it indicates

the absence of it, so Ayrrhythmia, the absence of a normal rhythmic heartbeat, and here the term is called Aetonia, which is normally when we go into REM sleep, our brain paralyzes our body so our minds can dream

safely and we don't have as a consequence any muscle tone hence the absence of muscle tone, otherwise known as

REM sleep atonia. And by the way you can imagine this is a very smart

evolutionary mechanism. What we don't want to be doing when we're not perceiving

the external world, our eyes are closed, we can't see what's around us, it is dark.

If you were to start dreaming that you could fly under those conditions,

you may be popped out of the gene pool very quickly. Nature came up with a very

clever mechanism called REM sleep paralysis

so we still get to dream and have all of the motoric physical movement-based

aspects of dreaming but without the dangers.

And this brings us back to REM sleep behavior disorder

because in REM sleep behavior disorder,

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