The detection of the human respiration waveform in the sleep state is crucial for applications in intelligent health care as well as medical and healthcare in that different respiration waveform patterns can be examined to analyze sleep quality and monitor respiratory diseases. Traditional respiration sensing methods based on contact devices cause various inconveniences to users. In contrast, contactless sensing methods are more suitable for continuous monitoring. However, the randomness of the device deployment, sleep posture, and human motion during sleep severely restrict the application of contactless respiration sensing solutions in daily life. For this reason, the study proposes a detection method for the human respiration waveform in the sleep state based on impulse radio-ultra wide band (IR-UWB). On the basis of the periodic changes in the propagation path of the wireless pulse signal caused by the undulation of the human chest during respiration in the sleep state, the proposed method generates a fine-grained human respiration waveform and thereby achieves the real-time output of the respiration waveform and high-precision respiratory rate estimation. Specifically, to obtain the position of the human chest during respiration from the received wireless radio-frequency (RF) signals, this study proposes the indicator respiration energy ratio based on IR-UWB signals to estimate the target position. Then, it puts forward a vector projection method based on the in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) complex plane and a method of projection signal selection based on the circumferential position of the respiration vector to extract the characteristic human respiration waveform from the reflected signal. Finally, a variational encoder-decoder network is leveraged to achieve the fine-grained recovery of the respiratory waveform in the sleep state. Extensive experiments and tests are conducted under different conditions, and the results show that the human respiration waveforms monitored by the proposed method in the sleep state are highly similar to the actual waveforms captured by commercial respiratory belts. The average error of the proposed method in estimating the human respiratory rate is 0.229 bpm, indicating that the method can achieve high-precision detection of the human respiration waveform in the sleep state.