The Secret Of Sleep In David Randall's Dreamland

Think for a moment about the world; think about our faced paced environment, about how we work ourselves away, about those soldiers who have to stay awake all night surveying a hostile environment. Now consider the United States’ sleeping habits in general, people try to last day to day on five or less hours of sleep a night. Society is pushing a sleepless workplace; actually, depriving one’s self of sleep is one of the worst possible things that can be done. Sleep loss affects everyone; it will dull the focus and gnaw at the logic of even the most intelligent individual.

Looking into the “normal” efforts of sleep, scientists push for around seven and a half to eight hours of sleep a night. There are anomalies to that rules, but they are just that. In David Randall’s book Dreamland, the secrets of sleep are explored through interviews with scientists who specialize in the field. Randall notes that younger people, teenagers, actually need more sleep, that number has been placed at around eight and a half to nine hours every night. Before natural light people had to go to bed right when it got dark, this new light source drastically changed how the world slept. Instead of a single sleeping period through the whole night, everyone woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour. This was described as the most peaceful period experienced. There were also claims that women are more fertile during this period. When people do not get those numbers they contribute to what has been known as a sleep debt (Randall, Ch 1). The normal response as to how to repay that debt is to go to bed earlier, as it turns out that is not always possible. This is because of over packed schedules, or sometimes because of a more biological reason. Many p...

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...use of how the flow of time works. This makes sleeping a much direr need, for when it’s lost its gone, a fear is created from this. Fortunately, sleep is automatically made up by the brain. Normal sleep cycles shift through every ninety minutes, when ones has been sleep deprived their brain adjusts those cycles to accommodate for significantly more REM sleep as if in compensation for missed time. The ability to make up sleep helps the body’s natural clock called the circadian rhythm. This internal sleep timer can easily be thrown off by adding unnatural lights or traveling across several time zones quickly. When this happens, the brain gets confused because it hasn’t a chance to adjust to the differences in lighting. When being in this state of confusion, the body tries to stick with the old schedule.