Paul Martin - Counting Sheep - The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams

The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams

PAUL MARTIN

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Harper Press 2003

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2002

Copyright © Paul Martin 2002

Paul Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006551720

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007406784

Version: 2016-02-11

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

PART I: PRELIMINARIES

1: A Third of Life

A sleep-sick society?

The universal imperative

Half asleep

Nice, not naughty

PART II: INSUFFICIENCIES

2: Sleepy People

Are we sleep-deprived?

Are you sleep-deprived?

Reasons for not sleeping

Ancient and modern

Sleepy drivers

Sleepy pilots

Sleepy doctors

The madness of politicians

Truly, madly, sleepily

The price of eternal vigilance is liberty

3: Dead Tired

Sleepiness

Fighting the beast

A soil for peevishness

Tired people are stupid and reckless

Alcohol, beauty and old age

Champion wakers

Uses and abuses

4: The Golden Chain

A waking death

Body and soul

Sleep, immunity and health

The Battle of Stalingrad

Sleepless in hospital

PART III: MECHANISMS

5: The Shapes of Sleep

Measuring sleep

Falling asleep again, what am I to do?

The sleep cycle

The paradoxical world of REM

The sleep cycle continued

Waking up

The quality of sleep

Meditating – or only sleeping?

6: Morpheus Undressed

The rhythms of life

So SAD

Larks and owls

Genes and sleep

A sleeplessness that kills

7: Strange Tales of Erections and Yawning

Nocturnal erections

The mystery of yawning

8: Friends and Enemies of Sleep

Brother caffeine

Sister alcohol

Tobacco

Food for sleep

Exercise is bunk, isn’t it?

Things that go bump in the night

Shift work

Poppy, mandragora and drowsy syrups

Hypnotic exotica

PART IV: DREAMS

9: The Children of an Idle Brain?

To sleep, perchance …

Do flies dream?

A dream within a dream?

Dreaming as madness

Are dreams meaningful?

Like wine through water

Can dreams be sinful?

10: A Second Life

A creative state

Stevenson’s Brownies

Lucid dreams

The great dreamer

PART V: ORIGINS

11: From Egg to Grave

Screaming babies

Bad children

Yawning youth

Old and grey and full of sleep

12: The Reason of Sleep

The evolution of sleep

What is sleep for?

What is REM sleep for?

Reverse learning

To sleep, perchance to learn

Should machines sleep?

PART VI: PROBLEMS

13: Bad Sleepers

An intolerable lucidity

Why can’t you sleep?

Storm and stress and sleep

What to do?

Staying awake

14: Dark Night

Walking and talking

Nightmares, night terrors, sleep paralysis and the Old Hag

Moving sleep

Midnight feasting

Soggy sheets

Aching heads

Troubled guts

Troubled minds

Sudden nocturnal death

Narcolepsy

15: Pickwickian Problems

The wonderful world of snoring

Silence is golden

Breathless in bed

Consequences – mostly dire

Unblocking those tubes

PART VII: PLEASURES

16: And So to Bed

A brief history of beds

Sleeping partners

17: An Excellent Thing

Puritans and hypocrites

Naps, nappers and napping

Sweet dreams

Blessed oblivion

Give sleep a chance

In praise of horizontalism

Keep Reading

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Man … consumes more than one third of his life in this his irrational situation.

Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1801)

Sleep: a state so familiar yet so strange. It is the single most common form of human behaviour and you will spend a third of your life doing it – 25 years or more, all being well. When you die, a bigger slice of your existence will have passed in that state than in making love, raising children, eating, playing games, listening to music, or any of those other activities that humanity values so highly.

Sleep is a form of behaviour, just as eating or socialising or fighting or copulating are forms of behaviour, even if it is not the most gripping to observe. Most of the action goes on inside the brain. It is also a uniquely private experience, even when sharing a bed. When we are awake we all inhabit a common world, but when we sleep each of us occupies a world of our own. Most of us, however, have precious little awareness of what we experience in that state. Our memories of sleeping and dreaming mostly evaporate when we awake, erasing the record every morning.

Many of us do not get enough sleep and we suffer the consequences, often without realising what we are doing to ourselves. The demands of the 24-hour society are marginalising sleep, yet it is not an optional activity. Nature imposes it upon us. We can survive for longer without food. When our sleep falls short in quantity or quality we pay a heavy price in depressed mood, impaired performance, damaged social relationships and poorer health. But we usually blame something else.

Sleep is an active state, generated within the brain, not a mere absence of consciousness. You are physiologically capable of sleeping with your eyelids held open by sticking plaster, bright lights flashing in your eyes and loud music playing in your ears. We shall later see how science has revealed the ferment of electrical and chemical activity that goes on inside the brain during sleep, and how the sleeping brain operates in a quite different mode from waking consciousness. We shall see too how lack of sleep erodes our quality of life and performance while simultaneously making us more vulnerable to injuries and illness. Science amply supports William Shakespeare’s view that sleep is the ‘chief nourisher in life’s feast’.