Does anyone else find the concept of sleep mental?

[vivi45]

Probably a very weird thought process but I’m just laying here, ready to go to sleep thinking how strange it is that we spend so much of our life unconscious. If I sleep from 11pm-7am which is normal for me, I will have slept the equivalent of my work day. All of the things I’ve done during the day, meals I’ve eaten, people I’ve spoken to, places I’ve been - and I’ll spend that same amount of time just laid in bed asleep. Also find it weird how the world just carries on while we are oblivious to it.

Sorry I know this is incredibly random 😂

Ah a weird thread!!! My favourite! Yes I think about this type of stuff all the time! And the fact we live on a spinning planet in the middle of vast space, and we are such a small minority compared to the trillions of other planets and solar systems out there, that our brain cannot even comprehend exists!

I know just what you mean . It's such a design flaw!

I find it weird that when you wake up in the night you can hear animals awake.

Sleep is very weird. Dreams are even weirder - you lie down in a darkened room, lose consciousness and then have wild hallucinations for hours. Then you get up, brush your teeth and pretend that everything's perfectly normal.

Dont get me wrong, I love sleep! We need it to function obviously but it does seem like a huge amount of time to just be unconscious and unaware.

I think about this a lot too. I know there's certain body processes that only happen when we're asleep, but why have we evolved that way? Why can't our cells regenerate or whatever all the time, even when we're awake. We are unconscious and completely vulnerable for 1/3 of our day. Crazy!

The having to lay down and pretend to sleep to be able to sleep gets me.

Crazy isn't it? So much of our lives we're essentially signed out of.

For me it's the lying in bed pretending to be asleep in order to actually fall asleep ... I can struggle with sleep and it's also boggling to me that people like my DH can just lie down and immediately be asleep, with no effort required!

Imagine if someone invented an infusion or medicine or something that could mean you don’t need to sleep at all. Would you use it?

I think about this too. The body just shots down for a period. Kinda like being in between alive and dead. Very odd.

What I find even more strange are dreams! They're a concoction of things that have happened during your waking day, and it's even more strange when you dream about someone you haven't seen for years. We are technically offloading the data from our brains and recharging our batteries.

What I find weird is that whole roads, blocks of flats, hotels and everyone inside is asleep! Everyone oblivious to the world. Bizarre

We are basically robots that need charging, but if laptops and iPhones can charge up and be useful at the same time then we should have evolved to do the same.

Loads of things are weird. Like how we walk down the street in a straight line cos that’s how the pavement is. Days of the week don’t actually exist, they’re just names we use to give structure to time.

In a heartbeat. I often wonder if I could never need or want to eat vs never need to sleep which would be better. I reckon the time gain from sleep clinches it.

Yes I think about it all the time 😂

We all get changed into comfy clothes (that are not acceptable outside), get into a bed (complete with bed accessories) and shut our eyes in order to try to become unconscious for several hours.

And some people need more unconscious time than others and some people find it hard to become unconscious!? Wild.

It's this! That the way to get to sleep is by pretending to be asleep. Except for when your brain decides that sleep is a stupid idea so reminds you of that embarrassing but ultimately quite insignificant thing you said 20 years ago.
Then your brain and body does all sorts of wonderful healing stuff but your brain does that in part by making up mad stories.
It gets weirder when you think that your neighbours are lying in the dark metres from where you're lying in the dark going through the same process.

I agree! I think about this sometimes.

So I’ve got in my comfy clothes snuggled under my duvet fluffed my pillows and just flicking through MN to “switch off”

only now like everyone else who’ve read this post, I’m going to lay here for hours thinking about it ! 😂

night night everyone get a good one

When it's really cold in mid winter I feel sorry for animals and birds outside. I know they have fur and feathers, but if i had fur or feathers would I want to live outside all the time and never be able to come in (unless I had a burrow or set.)

US govt/military created quite a lot of the recreational drugs industry by searching for this holy grail.

And also proved that sleep deprivation causes psychosis within a few days.

I like sleep. It's practice for being dead. The concept of functionally not existing for a while and then returning - I find that pretty mind blowing.

Like amphetamines 🤣

Sorry.

No I wouldn't use it. I love my sleep, I'm not entirely sure I love my dreams... However... For as long as I can remember, I have had continuous dreams. For example, I won't remember my previous dream all day, and then as soon as I drift into the unconscious it comes back to me and that's where that nights dreaming starts. So, both my waking and sleeping hours are just a continuous stream of whatever is being thrown at me 😂
Also if I do remember my previous nights dream then I just consciously go back there and I fall asleep pretty much straight away.

It's all hard work!!

Yup, endlessly say we should be able to plug ourselves into the wall because there aren't enough hours in a day to sleep....from a mum whos in the 3 under 5 club 😜

It does seem to be a major evolutionary design flaw.
As do periods. Why evolve to leak significant quantities of fluid involuntarily.

I was literally thinking about this yesterday, it's such a bizarre concept when you think about it.

Is it giraffes that function on half an hour's sleep a day or something? How come they can do that and we can't?!