Who Needs Sleep Anyway?
I have always been fascinated by the science behind sleep, and why some people need more than others. You might be surprised to learn that I don't enjoy sleeping, and particularly not in the traditional way of eight hours continuously.
I have always suffered from nightmares, many of which are quite horrific, and I am sure I could write a horror movie based on them! They aren't the usual ones which people tend to have, such as being lost or naked, or losing their teeth or hair. I dream about miniature animals on a nightly basis, and invariably, they are not cute, but downright vicious!
I rarely go to bed before 1:00 am, and am wide awake at 6:00. This has been the pattern for most of my adult life. (And exactly the same pattern as Wolfgang Mozart!). Before I became a full-time writer, I worked for the UK government for 30 years and started work at 7:00 am every morning, and didn't find this a hardship. As we worked flexible hours, some of my colleagues didn't arrive before 9:30, as they "couldn't get out of bed." Really? What's that all about?
Obviously, it would be challenging to survive on only five hours sleep, so I do take a nap of a further hour during the day. This is known as a biphasic sleep cycle. However, some very influential people throughout the years have survived and prospered on very little sleep. They include Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci.
How about you? Are you a strictly eight hours person?
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I honestly love sleep. I like to sleep, to rest my mind, body, and soul. Unfortunately, there's not enough hours in the day to accomplish all that I want to accomplish in one day. Thereby, I usually get 5 hours of sleep, I am at my happiest at 7 hours of sleep though. My 12 hour shifts are from 7am-730pm. I get home at around 8 pm, spend time with my family, them dive into my laptop and get lost in the online world. I usually sleep around midnight then have to wake up at 5am to start my day.
I guess I wish we had more hours in the day. Probably because I work 12 hour shifts. If I worked only 8 hour shifts, I feel like I would accomplish more in my day.
Good morning Diane! LOL I've thought a lot about sleep lately as I've been staying up so late working on my website.
When it comes to my sleep, I try to listen to my body. Currently, it is happiest with about 7 - 8 hours. Ideally on the same schedule of going to sleep and waking up.
I can wake up, be excited and productive. On the days that I'm overly excited and work too late; I end up dragging around for two days. (I'm just now getting over a couple day of dragging because of staying up till almost 2 am on Friday night. )
Maybe you should quickly write an article or story about these vicious little miniature animals. Never have to publish. But, by writing it, it would tell your mind that you have taken care of the task that involves these creatures. Then something else could fill the space. (Over the years, I've "worked" a lot in my dreams. Yet, I've never worked on stuff that I already did. Always something that I needed to do or just other weird dreams - like the one with Jay. lol)
I hope you have a great week.
I need a LOT of sleep (like, I don't feel good if it's less than an 8-9 hour chunk), and it's very annoying...I've always envied those people who seem just fine on 5-6 hours a night! Right now I work from 3am to 8am, which is rough. If I didn't have a kid I would just go to bed early every night to make sure I got 8 hours and be done with it, but it's rough because life is still going on in my house then. I often have to nap while my daughter is at school in order to get through the day which really annoys me, because I'd love to be spending that time working to get myself OUT of the job that I have to get up at 2:30 for! I'm hoping to just...magically change somehow. :-D
About 30 years ago I had a job where the hours dictated that I slept between 00:30 and 05:30 and then again after work from 17:00 to !9:00. After a while I realized that during this afternoon sleep I was not actually fast asleep, more in a self-hypnotic trance. I was totally relaxed and motionless, yet fully aware of my surroundings. I frequently had floating sensations.
That hasn’t been repeated since I changed jobs and slept more “normal” hours. Nowadays I average about 5 to 6 hours of sleep a day in one go, occasionally grabbing a full eighth hours depending on shifts and commitments.
I don’t get nightmares every time I sleep as you do but I have a recurring one that appears intermittently. It’s always that I am on the run from something, either alone or with a friend or family member. The “something” is always different, it could be a person, an animal, a robot, an alien. Once, many years back, I recall it was a hostile Coca Cola can that was chasing me down. I had been reading too much Stephen King, methinks!
Best wishes,
Steve.
Unless I have been really physical active in the day to exhaustion I normally cope with about 5 hours sleep since I was a teenager. If I sleep too long I tend to get headaches.
Great post
Andre
Average about the 6 hour mark currently. Might there be another reason Sigmund Freud didn't need a great amount of sleep? I always used to think the sleep cycle was approx 4 hours so that when you were woken up mid cycle you inevitably felt like you hadn't slept well. On that premise a good four hour sleep should do it. My daughter did some work on sleep whilst she was doing a psychology course and told me the 4 hour thing was a myth, the cycles were shorter ,like an hour and a half. I love sleeping but can't and won't lie in.
Your daughter is right - sleep goes in about 90-minute cycles (I know this because my daughter, now 5, was terrible sleeper as an infant and I spent many long hours reading everything I could looking for a solution, haha!). It's so funny how it seems the point in the cycle in which we wake up can make such a difference in how rested we feel, right?
I agree,although,something I have tried to drum into my children over the years (as they seem to be biologically joined to their beds) is that once you are actually up and out of bed the body can take as little as 30 minutes to engage fully, no matter how much sleep you've had.
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Hello Diane,
Good to know that you rarely sleep before 01.00 hour in the morning. As a novelist myself, I also find that I enjoy writing from 22.00 hours to 01.00 hour. Have a blessed day.
Joseph