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048: Sleep

Sleep is a funny thing. Well, not so much when you're not getting it, but, as a necessary part of our existence, it certainly runs counter to an animal's need to stay alert in order to survive against stronger predators. Maybe it is because we have walls and doors and guns and laws and police to protect us that we can relax enough to talk about "getting enough sleep."

I was doing a bit of reading about dreams and sleep yesterday, just a little googling around, thinking about my current state of partial sleep-deprivation (long weekend doing a network backbone upgrade). I discovered an argument that sleep (or, more specifically, REM sleep) is imperative to the learning process. REM sleep is the time where your brain tries things out, where it tests new ideas, new practices, before putting them into play. REM sleep is where you learn, where things are shifted from short-term to long-term storage and where certain other behaviors and learned patterns are dismantled. REM sleep is the time where your brain optimizes itself, flushes cache, and otherwise reorders itself in order to be focused and receptive to new material.

So what happens when you don't sleep? You get dull. Not just in that sense which drives people away from you at cocktail parties, but also in the way in which your brain can't absorb new information and in the way in which your imagination curls up and dies.

I had a sleep study done about a year ago. I suffer from what a goodly number of us "heavyset" lads have to deal with: airway obstruction while sleeping. When you sleep, your body relaxes, a lot of your muscles take some time off -- put their feet up, pop a beer, watch some TV sort of chilling -- and, in the case of round boys, this includes the muscles in your throat. Your air passage closes off and oxygen stops making its way to your brain. Your brain hits the panic button and beer gets spilled, the ottoman gets knocked over, and the muscles hit the fire pole like they're responding to a four-alarm blaze. Oxygen gets in, the brain calms down, and everything relaxes again.

You can see how the cycles works. In my case, my brain was slapping the panic button every minute or so during the night. Which meant I never got to REM state; I never really slept. And, worst of all, I didn't dream.

You can survive without dreaming. But it is such a pale, colorless world compared to the technicolor eruption of full-on REM sleep. I'm a junkie for the good sleep now; it had been so long that I had really forgotten what it was like to have my head burning. I had my "war on sleep" during college and the successive years, trying to shave off minutes from my sleep time in order to get more things done. Sure, I was awake more, but I wasn't really aware as much.

The people at the sleep center and at the medical supply house who gave me the Darth Vader mask I sleep with now talked a lot about "paying back the sleep bank" and how I would sleep more when I was actually sleeping. I did for a few weeks, but certainly not enough to pay back a ten year debt. No, I slept a little more each night because I was having such a good time dreaming. And, like all optimization and reorganization processes, at some point you are done. Your brain has finished processing yesterday and you are ready for tomorrow.

Apparently birds are the only other creature which dream as much as we do. Do they dream of flying?

Posted by Teppo at June 11, 2003 04:40 PM

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