Sleep Emancipation!

Deb: I came across this article on FB. I am sure many of you have seen it. But honestly guys—changed my life. Changed my whole way of thinking about sleep. I will no longer feel that deep pang of loneliness when I am up at 3am. Rather, I will feel a connection to my ancestors and a needed break from my unconscious state. I will relax. I will do something simple to occupy my time and I will resume my sleep only when I feel the drooping flutter of my lids. Really worth reading!

Article in the Daily Mail UK by Ted Thornhill

Most people believe that life can become a bit of a nightmare without getting an unbroken eight hours of shuteye each night – but sleep experts are arguing the case for the broken sleep pattern.

Historian Roger Ekirch from Virgina Tech has been researching sleep for the past 16 years and has produced a wealth of evidence that it is perfectly normal for slumber to be interrupted. In fact, one sleep expert even suggests that broken nighttime patterns can help regulate stress.

Sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs told the BBC World Service during a debate: “For most of evolution we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.” He added that when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, this increased the ability to keep stress under control.

Ekirch, meanwhile, in his book At Day’s Close: Night In Times Past, references more than 500 examples of disrupted sleep patterns throughout history. The evidence ranges from diaries to court records, and medical text books to classic literature, including Homer’s Odyssey.

Not only did people in the past sleep in stretches, but some used the periods when they were awake to pray, smoke or even visit neighbours.

Also taking part in the BBC debate was Russell Foster, a professor of body clock neuroscience at the University of Oxford, who concurred with the other experts. He said: “Many people wake up at night and panic. I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2105490/The-myth-hour-sleep-How-scientists-increasingly-agree-rest-better-you.html#ixzz1nq2ya5El

Dream A Little Dream With Me

Barbara: Do you like to talk dreams? Because lately a friend keeps asking me to pay attention to them—out of curiosity, but also out of interest as to what they might dredge up—and it made me realize that I haven’t thought about my dreams in a long while.

(Costa Rica: photo by Phil)

I’m not one to believe that our dreams can predict our future or the future or any aspect of it (although I do believe that there is a certain kind of person for whom this might be true). But I do think that dreams are manifestations of our questions or concerns or stresses or even joys.

In the morning when I wake, I hardly ever remember my dreams. It was only several years ago when I was doing some research and was encouraged to really try and remember them that I made a concerted effort to recall details as soon as I woke up. And it worked! Suddenly I could see the strange places I’d been in my dreams that were kinda like familiar places in real life but then not. I began to write the details down in a journal that I kept beside my bed, and that process helped me remember the dreams with even greater clarity. This ritual was so effective that to this day I remember dreams I had during that period. (Okay, there was this one where I’m an amphibian creature crawling around a vividly verdant rainforest floor but I’m also looking at my creature-self from above, way up high from the lush trees, also trying to crane my eyes over the tree-line to the blue sky beyond it, when suddenly my amphibian self says, very clearly over the rainforest whoooosh, “What you’re looking for is not up there. It’s down here on the ground.” Even though it was my dream, I still think that’s a cool, apt life-reminder for any of us, no?)

(Costa Rica: photo by Phil)

Anyway, the cataloguing-dreams thing was just an exercise and pretty soon I dropped the habit and began again to jump out of bed as soon as I woke to hit the ground running. Dreams went back to being what they’d been before, these distant, vague, sometimes unsettling, sometimes blank impressions … and nothing more. 

So I decided to heed my friend’s recent advice and from now on spend a few moments every morning trying to remember my dreams. At first it was frustrating. I couldn’t remember a thing. And what’s worse, I could feel the memory of the dream zinging away from my mind’s-eye like a yo-yo, now here, now gone up from whence it came. But I realized that if I really worked to grab the memory back before it was too far flung(!), the details would rack into focus and I could examine it, turning it first one way and then the other until it made some kind of coherent sense. Now I can tell you with complete confidence that each of my dreams (much like the amphibian dream) has featured me looking for something. But in an intent, calm, and specific way. Either I’m asking people questions, or I’m searching my house (but not my house, rather that weird, dreamly version of it), or I’m off in some distant land, exploring and discovering it. Or—like in last night’s dream—I’m either a newly minted police officer or an actor learning to be one, and I’m taking all these notes and being super anal and asking all these questions about how the sleuthing should be done but also giving my (unsolicited) opinion when I think the sleuthing could be more effective (sadly, this is so me, sigh).

The thing is, I don’t know what I’m searching for in essence through all these dreams, but it does make sense to me that this is the conundrum I’d take into my REM: what is it? what is next? where is it all leading? what will I find? will I know what to do with it when I find it?

There’s a really weird side-note to all this: the same friend who started this interesting dream-quest also reminded me about that pen I lost all those years ago—and she challenged me to be open to finding it. So I’m lying in bed this morning, freshly awake, remembering that police-slash-actor-training dream in all its strange detail and suddenly my thoughts go to that errant pen, out of nowhere. And I get this deeply aware feeling that I know where it is. And it’s an option I’d long ago forgotten. I see it with another person. A person who said they didn’t have it way back then. As I said, an option I looked into and then put aside in favour of searching high and low in my own home. I’m not saying I believe it was stolen, I’m saying I just suddenly felt it was gone to this other, unreachable place. A real pen’s real whereabouts … or a metaphor for something else?

Are dreams speaking to us from some place we don’t ever tap into in waking life, or are they simply a wild kind of movie-version of what we already know? Is it the truth … or is it all just a dream?

Deb: Fascinating and timely subject, Barb—for me too. I am finding of late the insomnia seems to be the order of the day for me. Or I should say, order of the night. 3am to 6am to be specific. My feeling around this is that my dreams and wakefulness are a manifestation of that which I cannot face.

Although my day is filled with positive active movement regards the changes in my Mom and Dad’s life, my dreams are filled with doubt and self-judgment. When I wake up sometimes it is all I can do to shake them. But shake them I do. I know these images and feelings are the part of me that wants to plant the seed of self-doubt. And I guess if I had to choose, I’d take them during sleep rather than during a waking moment, which might affect my life or someone else’s life. So, yeah, I think the dreams are what we don’t and won’t tap into. I also think they are daring adventures that an unused part of our brain’s spirit wants to go on. And if we won’t go willingly, it takes us regardless.

You have inspired me to the dream journal, Barb. I have a splendid one that my husband bought me in Italy. A lovely brown leather deal with the moon and stars stitched on the cover. I will wait till this period of my life is settled and then I will start recording in it, not my dreams but the images and feelings provoked as a result of them. It’s pointless to do it right now though, as I know all too well which part of my brain this oddness and fear is coming from—and why. But soon, I will crack it open. Look out, brain, here I come. 

Sleepscape

Deb: When I am sad I fall into a hypnotic state. My brain becomes the drug pusher in this “trip” of sleep that takes over my body. Everyone deals with sadness and stress differently. I fall into sleep. Constantly and willingly. I cannot for the life of me stay awake no matter what.

My brain is protecting me. Good old brain. I look at my sleepscape as a gift, one that has been handed down to me through generations. You see, my people are sleepers. At least half of my people. My Dad is the sleeper, my Mom is the night owl partier. When I was growing up my Dad became the cartoon Dad in the comic strips. He could and would nap on a dime. Anytime, anywhere. Parties, picnics, plays, you name it. It was a sore spot for Mom as she saw this as disrespect and something for her to be embarrassed about. And from her point of view, I get it. She clocks her 18 hours of wake time and wears it like a badge of honour. Sleepers are weak from her point of view.

But as I’ve gotten older, I realize that we are all sleep wired. Our brains are dictating to our bodies just how much sleep we need. For me, it’s eight hours, but I’ll happily take nine. Can’t help it. To quote Popeye, “I yam who I yam.”

I read articles about people like Martha Stewart and her four hours of sleep and I am pea green with envy. Can you imagine all the things you could accomplish if you only required four hours? Wow. I could repaint the sky in that time. But I’m not awake long enough so I’ll just paint the bit that’s over my house.

And then I’ll do what I do with all the challenges in my middle-aged life. I’ll make friends with my sleep. After all, It gives me the morning gift of refreshed renewal and when I’m sad, it heals me. One nap at a time.

Barbara: Well, Deb, we are the same on this point. I have always needed a full night of sleep myself—yup, eight to nine hours––and I’ve always, always envied the don’t-need-to-sleep-much sleepers. Those people who get up at the crack of dawn (or earlier), workout, walk the dog, watch the sun rise, read the paper, then go to work, work their asses off, come home, fine dine, socialize, then write their manuscripts. It seems so purposeful, even if it also seems so potentially stressful. Funnily, for the longest time, I imagined you were one of those, Deb. You always seemed to be up and at ‘em. It’s strange how it comforts me to know that you do all that you do and get exactly the same amount of sleep as I need.

I also try to take comfort from those sleep studies that extol the virtues of a good eight hours for health and beauty reasons. But that might just be me grasping at straws—because the little-sleep people seem just as healthy and beautiful as any others (I mean, Martha Stewart? Come on. After all that she’s accomplished and been through, she’s downright babelicious.) So I think your “sleep wired” theory explains that little puzzle.

As for the sad sleep—well, there’s no doubt about sleep’s essential value when I’m in the doldrums. If my problems don’t haunt my dreams, the sleepscape––as you so beautifully call it—is such a tonic for my pain and stress and disappointment and loss. It is the place where I can actually paint the sky then fly through it unfettered, only coming back to earth when it’s time to wake up and face the world.

Sweet dreams, my dear friend.