Sleep (the 21st of May, 2013)

In which I discuss (you guessed it) sleep.

Sleep. It’s something we all need. And it’s also a really strange thing to think about.

 

There’s something pretty interesting about sleep. Some nights I lie awake, unable to escape reality for those short hours where I’m alive but not. Some nights my head hits the pillow and I’m out like a light.

 

Alive but not…I picked those words not because I couldn’t think of the correct words, but because I really meant them. It’s weird when I’m asleep, especially when I don’t dream. I know, you’re thinking, it’s only fun when you’re dreaming. But no, think about it: The nights you don’t dream, it feels so short of a time span. But then boom it’s the morning (or afternoon, whatever) and it didn’t feel like it had been six or eight or twelve hours. It felt like five minutes. It felt like thirty seconds.

 

While I’m thinking about it, I can’t really put a timestamp on how long I feel like I’m sleeping. I don’t know if you can (and if you can, tell me your secret), but I feel unable to accurately tell you how long I think I sleep.

 

I always thought it was such an interesting concept. I’m asleep, where my mind is gone to dream about sugar plum fairies or whatever I’m supposed to dream about. Yet my brain still works, because my lungs still work and my blood still flows and synapses still fire important neurological things. My mind is asleep, yet my brain is awake.

 

And it isn’t just humans in which this phenomenon takes place; dogs sleep, cats sleep (heck, they sleep for 16 hours per day on average), monkeys sleep, lions and tigers and bears sleep. In fact, the entire animal kingdom sleeps. It makes me wonder if these animals’ brains stay awake while their minds sleep.

 

And this might go into a debate about whether or not these animals possess conscious thought. And I don’t really want to get into that. Honestly, I don’t have any idea if lions and tigers and bears possess conscious thought. I would like to think they do, because they still care for their young and they love one another and they understand fear and danger. Yet something inside me hesitates to completely agree with that argument, since I haven’t seen any scientific evidence backing the thoughts I would like these animals to have.

 

Aw, I got into it. Am I a liar for that, or do I just type quicker than I think?

 

Now I don’t want to get into that.

 

Anyway, sleep. I started this passage out by stating that we need it. I kind of drifted away from this (enough to add that third sentence to make the flow of things a little better) but I want to get back to this. It’s an interesting idea that human beings need sleep in order to function. Now, the argument can be made that some people function just fine with little to no sleep. There was that one guy who claims he hasn’t slept in a crazy amount of time (20 years? Or since the 1970s?). Give me a second and I’ll Google it.

 

Okay, so the guy I was thinking about was Thai Ngoc, who claimed he had stayed awake for 33 years after having a fever in 1973 (so I was right about the 70s thing, kind of). Then there’s this other guy, Al Herpin, who claimed he had a rare case of insomnia and was actually known as the “Man Who Never Slept.”

 

Now there’s always the possibility these men are lying. I don’t know if they are. By all means, a bout of fever or a rare insomnia case could be the keys to always staying awake.

 

I would never wish that on my worst enemy, though.

 

I like sleep, to be perfectly honest. Not in the cliché “oh I can dream of a better life” way. I understand those who like sleep for this reason, but I am not one of them. I like sleep because it’s a way to escape a really bad day.

 

Sure, this means I sacrifice the really good days in order to escape from the bad days, but I think it’s all worth it. Not because I have more bad days than good (quite the contrary, if that’s even a phrase), but because the bad days can get really bad.

 

For example, today I woke up and went to work and then went to the dog park and then watched some Doctor Who and then checked my physics grade and literally cried tears of joy to see I received a B in that class and then I watched more Doctor Who and now I’m typing this thing. Today was a good day. Yet I’ll sacrifice this day when the clock strikes 10p (give or take a couple of minutes) and I’ll close my eyes and the day will end.

 

And thirty seconds or five minutes or whatever amount time will pass in my mind and my alarm will go off and I’ll start the next day. And the next day might be a really good day. And the day after that. Heck, this week might consist of really good days. I might not have a bad day until two months from now.

 

Yet I will sacrifice every good day for the next two months. I will end them although I won’t want to. And this is because when that bad day dawns upon me (haha, that’s a kind-of pun) I will be able to end it. That bad day will not be able to last forever. I’ll wipe my tears, breathe deeply, and go to sleep and forget all about that bad day.

 

I think it’s easier to forget about the bad days this way. I mean, it makes it easier that there are more good days than bad, and the Law of Superposition means I’m going to add these good and bad days up for a grand sum of a really good summer. However, at the same time, it is possible for me to end that bad day that drained my 24 hours away.

 

That’s a really nice beacon of hope.

 

I was saying something else because I got onto the “we need it” part of my first few sentences. I was saying something about alive but not. I kind of got into that, with the whole “brain is awake, mind is asleep” thing, but my subconscious has urged me that there is something underlying in my word choice. I really do speak it and then type it. This is how I write casually.

 

And I spoke the words “alive but not.”

 

I don’t think I meant it as dying when we sleep. That’s a pretty depressing way of looking at it. When I see those three words, I look at alive the most. I think of that one TV show that was about the guy who lived two different lives, the one where he was awake and the one where he was asleep. And he couldn’t figure out which life was the dream and which life was reality.

 

It also kind of reminds me of that one scene in Avatar (I’m not a big fan of that movie, but I digress) where Jake Sully (or Sulley? Does it even matter?) says that outside is the real world, and inside is the dream. And of course he’s talking about the big blue hunk of flesh he drives around, but I think it’s a good string of words.

 

I think it’s so easy to forget what’s real and what’s not.

 

Have you ever experienced a dream that felt so real, and you believed for just a second that it actually happened? This can mean anything in my sense of the question. If you had a dream about some person falling in love with you, that’s fair game. If you had a dream about purple people eaters taking over the planet, that’s fair game as well. It doesn’t even matter what the dream is. What matters is that for maybe just a second, you forgot what was real and what was not.

 

And it’s an interesting subject (beyond the “alive but not,” but this is what I wanted to discuss). I have a list of dreams I could relay to you where I believed they were real.

 

I have dreams of conversations with people in my life in which they felt real enough to where I felt closer to that person after that imaginary conversation (I’ll kind of get into that subject below). I felt a human connection after an imaginary conversation.

 

And that’s a really interesting thing about dreams.

 

You can feel something after those dreams. People wake up from their dreams feeling happy. In a more brutal way, people can wake up crying or absolutely petrified after a nightmare. In any event, a raw human emotion emerges from something that took place in your head.

 

It’s weird. I had a dream about a shark once (first of all, I was young, and second of all, I’m not even afraid of sharks, I believe this was a “in the moment” sort of dream) and I woke up terrified. I had one of those movie moments where I sat up in bed and I was breathing really hard and I had a cold sweat. In this case, however, I had no one to comfort me and tell me it was just a dream. I was alone in my room, and that very real fear might have kept me awake for hours. I don’t really remember though.

 

At the same time, I had this dream about having a conversation with a friend in my life and it felt like we talked for hours and I woke up feeling refreshed. Talking with people makes me feel less shaky about things in life, and although it wasn’t a real conversation (I know that, don’t you worry), it was refreshing.

 

In the former, I have no idea what I needed out of a dream with a shark. But in the latter, I feel as if I might have reached a breaking point of some sort where I needed that conversation to get through the next day. It was as if my mind was looking out for me. It was as if my mind wanted me to be all right.

 

My argument crumbles with the whole shark thing, though.

 

Whatever, I’m sticking to it. My mind looks out for me and gives me things I need sometimes.

 

Now that I looked back at the beginning of my passage, I see that I hinted at a “why insomnia occurs” subject that I can explore. I’ve got plenty of time, so sit back, even though I was going to end it there.

 

When I was in the 8th grade, I had horrible insomnia. I had this book thing; it was kind of like a diary, but it was formatted more like a calendar. In any event, it had the dates and the days of the week from January to December for the entire year. I would circle the dates where I had insomnia, and it numbered to about four to five times a week.

 

For an 8th grader, this insomnia was bad. I just could not sleep to save my life. I was close my eyes and yawn a lot and literally count sheep, but I just couldn’t sleep.

 

(Now, I wrote the word “literally” and you may or may not have a problem with that. I realize and accept the fact I wrote the word “literally” because I literally want it there. I would close my eyes and imagine sheep jumping over a fence and I would count them. And I would count them for hours. I counted past one hundred on one occasion before I gave up.)

 

Now, this stems from a pretty big change in my life at that point and I really do believe my mind was refusing to accept this change. Maybe my mind was punishing me because I ignored the fact that my life changed that year. Maybe my mind was stuck in denial. Or maybe my mind was in the bargaining phase of the five stages of grief, where it was bargaining sleep in order for this change to not happen. I don’t really know, and it doesn’t really matter to me at this point (although these ideas are really good ones).

 

(Now, I understand I’m being pretty vague about this change in my life. I realize and accept this fact, and I hope you can as well. It might come up again, but it’s not an important aspect of the story.

 

In another way, this does explore the “why insomnia occurs” subject I mentioned. In some ways, I’m avoiding the subject I hinted at near the top of my passage. However, I found a different way to tie things together. Someday I might explore this, but for right now, I will not.)

 

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that I understand what it feels like to not be able to sleep. I understand what it feels like to not be able to escape the days that bothered me, and the days that were really amazing. Either way, I hated it. I wanted that escape. And I also believe this is why my subconscious started with “everyone needs [sleep],” because I understand perfectly well that I need sleep and you probably need sleep as well.

 

To which I want to say that I think sleep is more important than we can comprehend. I believe human beings may never comprehend the deep psychological reasons why sleep is needed for a healthy normal life.

 

I’m not even trying to say that escaping reality is a deep psychological reason why sleep is needed. For me, escaping from reality is nice. For you, this might not be the case. You might have some other deep reason why sleep is good. And I’m all right with that. I’m willing to accept that I might never understand why human beings crave sleep. And I don’t believe I need to understand this. It’s not the field I’m interested in. If someone figures it out, that’s brilliant. If someone already has figured it out, that’s brilliant as well. For now, I’m just going to shrug my shoulders and be on my way.

 

And that’s all I have to say about sleep at the moment. Maybe it’s because I’m tired myself, or because my phone is dying. Maybe it’s because I’m sick of staring at a computer screen.

 

In any event, here it is. I’m winging it at the moment. I have no game plan.

 

And it seemed to turn out pretty well. 

Author's Note

Let me know.