Alpha power fluctuates dynamically throughout the night.

A. The trajectory of relative alpha power throughout a quiet night of sleep is shown from one representative subject. Simultaneous sleep stage designations run beneath the time course of alpha power. Diminishing as sleep begins, alpha power fluctuates throughout the night, in tandem with sleep depth. For display, the alpha power time-series was approximated using local linear regression in 4 minute windows, corresponding to the approximate length of each stimulation series (see Materials and Methods). This procedure removes noise and emphasizes slower fluctuations with fewer distortions than those imposed by simple low-pass filtering [42]. B. These histograms show the distribution of alpha power during NREM sleep, revealing that a range of values can be observed within each of stages N2 and N3. Power was computed in non-overlapping 10-second bins; epochs containing arousals, which may represent transient departures from stable sleep, were discarded.