Thanks for sharing those studies, fascinating stuff, I had no idea the delirium tremens sleep disturbances were so similar to narcolepsy type 1 (but given narcolepsy is treated with essentially GHB it checks out).
Kind of like an extreme REM rebound. A lot of the GABAergic drugs seem to markedly suppress REM. Interestingly cholinergic drugs seem to do the opposite (increasing REM at the expense of slow wave sleep).
It's very much like REM and SWS (CSF flushing) are a kind of a biological yin and yang.