While You Were Sleeping
Sleep is a state of being in which the individual is relatively unresponsive to external stimuli, typically with eyelids closed, in a supine postural position. This activity has a certain periodicity during a 24 period.
Translation: When you sleep, you’re totally out of it and probably lying down, and you do it around the same time everyday. Yes, this could just as accurately describe a daily bubble bath, but just deal with it. I don’t have time for this.
Very helpful pictorial representation:
Sleep seems like a relatively passive, lazy experience, but that is far from the truth. There is a whole lot going on.
While you sleep, your brain goes through cycles of 5 phases: phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, phase 4, and REM (rapid eye movement).
Each complete cycle lasts about 90 minutes.
Phase 4 is the deepest, most restorative sleep. It’s in this phase that your cells engage in protein synthesis and repair themselves. Why don’t they do it while we’re awake? I guess we’re not good multitaskers. Deep sleep is a time for cellular housekeeping, since our body doesn’t have to tend to our waking needs like moving and whining.
During REM sleep, your brain is more active than it is when you’re awake. REM is important for brain development and maintaining neural connections you’ve made while you’re awake, which is why sleep is so important for your memory. Infants’ developing brains spend 50% of their sleep in REM, while adults spend just 24% of their sleep there.
REM sleep is quite famous because it’s where dreams happen (but never come true! Bwahahaha). To protect you from yourself, the brain shuts off the spinal cord during REM sleep so that you can’t punch yourself while you dream about fighting off those ninjas. When there is an error in this step, you get your really fun sleep walking or night terror incidents. I’ve sleepwalked (sleptwalked?) a few times in my life. One of those times involved my sleepwalking crazyface ripping the covers off the bed and telling my then boyfriend (current husband) that a little boy in the living room asked me to bring him the blanket. I don’t recommend doing this to anyone. They really don’t like it.
If you wake up during this REM-induced paralysis, you can experience sleep paralysis awfulness. I’ve never woken up this way (because my REM paralysis doesn’t work so well–see above), but I’ve heard it’s rather terrible.
Superstitious people of yore were particularly disturbed by sleep paralysis and came up with some convincing explanations. They imagined an Old Hag whose spirit would come and sit on your chest, leaving you breathless and motionless when you woke up. The term nightmare originally described this feeling of sleep paralysis, not bad dreams like it does today.
The sleep phenomenon that science has yet to tackle is why any kind of baby is cute when it’s asleep, especially when it’s in an inappropriate place.
During my research for some funny pictures of people/animals sleeping, I discovered that these domain names are mysteriously unclaimed. Investment opportunity!
uglysleep.com
uglysleeper.com
sleepingininappropriateplaces.com
sleepingupsidedown.com
hahayoureasleep.com
wakeupcrazyface.com
But this one is taken, and definitely worth a look: cutethingsfallingasleep.org
