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 😂

There’s a book called money that is fascinating, as is Sapians that covers the concept of money.

Great thread. I'm in the space at the moment with my 5 month old who seems to not want me to sleep EVER. I find myself during the day looking at my dog snug in her bed, thinking, I wish we could trade lives for a day....Just one day of continuous sleep 😅🤣🤣🤣

This! DH can fall asleep in ten minutes, whereas it can take me hours.
Read 'Why we Sleep' by Matthew Walker, it's fascinating and really explains why we need so much sleep and what can happen if we don't get enough.

Ha. I now think I’m going to overthink going to sleep tonight

This is what I find weird too; not that we need to sleep at all but that at certain times, most people in a geographical area are basically unconscious.

That is actually crazy…the idea that we made up names for time!

@EveningSpread omg the days of the week thing!! My mind is completely boggled by that.. now I definitely won’t sleep!

This is one of the best threads for ages.😁

Yes this. Also, it's strange how you (at least in my case) tend to know your neighbours' sleep patterns. I am usually in bed by 9 (fore-mentioned chronic illness) and up around 3 then back to bed then up at 5. Immediate neighbours are bed at 10, up at 7. Bed at 11 up at 8. One of my neighbours usually surfaces at 8 but did not one day so we called her DD and she had had a fall. We knew because of light patterns in the window.

This thread is brilliant and now I am afraid I am missing precious sleep !

I spend an unreasonable amount of time imagining super-evolved aliens looking at earth and observing humans going about their lives. I always think they must find sleeping bizarre. Also dancing, singing and playing sports.

And minutes, hours and months too. And aren’t all our months messed up anyway as Sept, Oct, nov and dec are basically 7,8, 9 and 10. So we made it up and confused ourselves and then corrected it.

Old folk haven't the time to waste sleeping, plus, there's less to "repair" as you get older given that an awful lot of it is already beyond repair!
Don't ask me how I know😉

It is weird isn’t it and we’re so vulnerable too.

What I do love is that moment when you’re drifting off to sleep, does your brain produce something during this time? I’d love to bottle that feeling. It happens too when the alarm goes off in the morning, you hit snooze and you start to drift off again. God a love that feeling 🤣

Plus the whole Julian and Gregorian calendar thing.

That's quite hilarious. But when I lived in Russia I loved 2 Christmases.

lol I do this too. I wonder what they would think of people lighting little paper encased leaves and then inhaling them through their mouths.

It's so funny that you've said this. I was about to add another book recommendation to the pile. It's not necessarily about sleep, but an alien's perspective of our human quirks. I'm not into alien stuff usually, but it's brilliant! V similar to many comments on this thread. The Humans by Matt Haig.

I think about this a lot too. I'd love it if we needed less sleep, although darkness affects my mood, so I might be very moody if I was awake all through the dark hours?

Tell you what is weird, a friend and I had the same dream last week. We both dreamt that we were papering ceilings! Really random, I've never papered a ceiling in my life - it was hard work in the dream and i woke up shattered from the effort.

I haven't slept since I was seven, too much to do.

I have bloody ADHD sleep patterns which mean I stay up late, completely wide awake while every one around me is asleep. I can hear DP snoring, my upstairs neighbour isn't stopping around and my next door neighbour has her radio on. It's so weird. I wonder what my colleagues and friends are doing. Are they asleep or are they MNetting or doing something else. I would like to just flip a switch or press a button like I do my TV or laptop and immediately go into sleep mode. If we're going to have to do it at least make it easier.

Dreams are so bonkers!! I had the most realistic one the other night - a cat jumped through a cellar window with a massive koi Karp in it's mouth, still alive. It dropped the fish which I got in a bucket and went back and forth pouring water over so it could breathe, but I was aware that the more water I added to the bucket the heavier it would get until it would be too heavy for me to carry up the cellar steps. But I knew if I stopped pouring the water it would die. I have nothing to do with cellars, cats or fish. They just don't enter into my life in any way, and yet this dream was so vivid, down to the intricate pattern and shine of the koi Karp's scales! I felt so weird waking up after that. It probably signifies something really deep!

OP, sleep is a really odd concept! But then so is life generally. It hurts my brain if I think about it!

YANBU and how on earth did we survive in the wild being unconscious for this long 😅

I have adhd and I manage to get maybe 4 hours a night..... but once a month my body completely crashes and I get a good 12 to 16 hours sleep in one go 😅 ( I'll wake up to use the toilet but will be so exhausted I'll fall back asleep straight away )

I was thinking about this yesterday, as I really do love sleep, but (as you rightly say) we don't actually experience sleep itself, so what's to love? It's not the getting cosy and ready, it's genuinely being asleep, because I can be cosy, ready, but it's the actual going to sleep but I love. But then I quite enjoy the feeling of a general anaesthetic, so maybe I just love the state of unconscious. Maybe I just don't like being awake. I like nothing better than waking up a 4am and realising I have 3 more delicious hours of sleep. I can quite happily have a nap in my lunch breaks when I work from home.

I'm in my mid 70s, the time when I'm supposed to sleep less.

And to an extent, that's true for me, hence me posting just before midnight.

what I find interesting about my sleep patterns is that I cannot sleep, ever, in public, never. I guess that's some kind of atavistic thing, in case a dinosaur comes to get me.

However, if I'm ill, I can sleep just about anywhere anytime. That seems logical to me, my body clearly needs all its energy to get well, so it shuts other stuff down. That's my totally unscientific reasoning.

Oh, but I do love my dreams. They are so interesting. If I awake in the night, I'll often lull myself back to sleep by remembering my dreams.

Anyway, sleep well, all. I'm back to my sleep, no dinosaurs here 😁

My brother and I had the same dream once too. Years ago. It wasn't about anything that had happened to us either, it was completely random.