Sleep With Me

This video is by a British band that calls themselves Girlfriends. The group and director both deserve an award because the video is by far the best YouTube video that dealt with the topic of narcolepsy. In "Sleep with Me" we see the Barnaby Legg fight a loosing battle with narcolepsy.

If you are interested in checking out the other the less notable YouTube videos to get a better understanding of this rare yet intreging sleep disorder go right ahead.

43things

The website 43things.com lets visiters discover what is important in thier lives and it helps them reach goals. When I stumbled upon this site that had over 800,000 people who submited thier answer the the question "What do you want to do with your life?"

In the FAQ they explain that:

"Other people often have great ideas. You can get inspiration from others. Adopt a goal as your own or set up your own goals from scratch. Either way, 43 Things can help you document your success, share information, and make progress on what matters to you most".

One the homepage right below the space where you shold put your goal there is a hyperlinked list that includes things like "buy a house", "graduate from college" "have a CAREER instead of a job." The very first statement in this cloud of dreams and ambition was Phil's goal to "sleep soundly."

This was one of 30 things Phil wanted.

It didn't take too much soul searching for me to entered "publish a magazine." I found that there were 51 people on 43things.com that were doing and/or wanting the same thing. This is a pretty cool concept website.

Lets get back to Phil and his need for sleep; I did some investigating and it looks like 900 users want "more sleep" and 861 users want "sleep!". This is very interesting but everyone should want sleep, in one sense or another, so this doesn't really tell us something. The thing that is really heart breaking is that a little over 500 people put sleep as their top goal in life. I can't help but laugh at the irony; as narcoleptic of course. Although I'm hesitant to pity these sleep deprived people there is something very twisted about this situation.

Wait a minute, to date there are 4,666 people that have "wake up when my alarm clock goes off" as a major goal in their lives. Maybe they should think about aiming for something more like "not need an alarm clock."

Chasing Dreamtime

This award winning travel book is based on the real-life story of Neva Sullaway and her derailed attempt to sail around the world which landed her in the boat-hoping in the South Pacific.

"While poised at the brink of her physical and emotional limits in the stark Never-Never, Sullaway catches a glimpse of the elusive Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime and her darkest demons unfold into wings of flight. For Sullaway and the reader alike, reality can never be the same again."

A Philosophical Approach to Getting Out of Bed

The following is from Slow Down Now:

Americans are fantastically well educated. If they are not getting extra masters degrees at night, then they are taking classes on how to do something practical. Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can find a class on time management, travel to foreign parts, or Tantric sex. The energy to do all this is only to be admired.

I’ve seen classes advertising how to massage your pet, operatic singing for the unmusical, and how to adjust an insurance claim. Although these might seem compelling, especially insurance adjusting, which promises hours of fun, I’ve never seen a class for someone like me. I need something basic. If we need to learn to dress for success, then surely we need some prerequisites.

I’m talking about how to get out of bed. Most of us manage to get out of bed, eventually. Employers expect as much. But while some people can rise in the morning with grace, facility, and aplomb, others get out of bed only after much effort. We in the latter group give birth to our daily consciousness only through gargantuan struggle. We may glimpse a waking state long enough to reach out and silence the alarm clock only to submerge again beneath a sea of dreams.

It’s not always easy to know if you’re awake: you could be dreaming. It may seem of no consequence that you find yourself on public transport nude, making a speech to a group of penguins, or flying above a giant teacup. Only on reflection do you realize that you only dreamt you were awake.

In the seventeenth century, the philosopher René Descartes spent a lot of time mulling over the problem of whether he existed or not. He famously said, “I think therefore I am.” He thought he did exist. So he must have tackled the am-I-awake-or-not question.

If you are aware you are lying in bed, then the mind will eventually pose another profound question: “Should I get up?”

Great minds have thought deeply about this question. In 1650 Blaise Pascal turned away from his studies in mathematics to contemplate the “greatness and the misery of man.” He decided, ”Most of the evils of life arise from man’s being unable to sit still in a room.” It only follows then that lying in bed must be a virtue.

Marcel Proust stayed in bed for almost a decade due to real or imagined aliments. His bed became his workplace. You probably had to be ill in bed to read Marcel Proust’s one-and-a-quarter-million-word novel, In Search of Lost Time. But Proust was a genius because he knew how to slow down. He took seventeen pages to describe a man trying to get back to sleep in his bed.

The great bed of Ware, mentioned in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, was made to accommodate twelve people. Just to think about it makes the mind boggle. If you go to Rye House in Broxbourne, England, you can see it today. But imagine getting out of the middle of that bed on a full night. It would be worse than being strapped into the center seat on a crowded and turbulent flight after drinking too many cups of tea.

Of course, getting out of bed can be dangerous no matter what size bed you happen to be in. Augustus Caesar was superstitious about it. In ancient times, it was unlucky to set the left foot on the ground first. Even today, we ascribe grumpiness to getting out of bed on the wrong side. In ancient Rome, augury and omens were taken seriously. This sort of thing has gone out of fashion. But if you wake up to large black ravens sitting on your bedposts, or you see a plague of frogs out the window, I say, beware. Some days it is better not to get out of bed.

But virtuous as it may be to stay in bed, there are those who would argue to the contrary. If I were a Stoic, I would leap from my hard bed and run naked into a nearby mountain stream. I would be bursting with vigor and manliness. I would be valiant. I would be an example of moral rectitude. However, when I consider, from the warmth of my early-morning bed, I come to the conclusion that I may not really be a Stoic.

I find lying in bed is the most efficient place for some early-morning thinking. There is evidence to back this up. Scientists tell us that we achieve beneficial mental states between sleep and wakefulness. Sleeping longer can even make you more intelligent. In William Demnet’s book, The Promise of Sleep, he cites a study on students at Harvard. They were encouraged to sleep an extra hour-and-a-half. At first, they objected because of their busy course schedules. But they went along with the program. The result: grades went up. The bad news is that sleep debt lowers IQ points. I wish I had known that when I was at school. I would have stayed in bed even longer.

I did stay in bed quite a lot when I was an art student in England. I lived in a vast, cold 1850’s house. It had been made into flats in the 1930’s by sectioning off one floor from the next. I lived on the ground floor. The large rooms were originally the receptions rooms and library. There were gargoyles in the hallway. A massive curving stairway simply ended in the ceiling.

An elderly woman in another part of the country owned the house. I paid rent to an agent who never, in the eight years I lived there, came to visit, or repaired anything, or increased the rent.

The miniscule rent must have been fixed some twenty years previously. It was impossible to heat the cavernous rooms. I occasionally found wood to burn in the huge fireplaces. In winter, ice would form on the insides of the shuttered windows. Getting out of bed was a near impossibility. I would sleep under all the blankets and coats I owned. I even wore a hat. I remain eternally grateful to a few of my fellow female art students who generously helped me stay warm under such trying nighttime winter conditions.

Life has a habit of being more demanding. We have to go to work. It is at these times that we resort to the alarm clock. I know that using such a word is offensive, but I don’t know an appropriate euphemism. As everyone knows, alarm clocks were invented in the depths of Hell. We humans should be gently born into each new day; not confronted with shock, terror, loathing, and fear.

If you have an alarm clock, you can’t help but look at the beastly contraption. You make rules for yourself. You’ll stay in bed for just five more minutes. Then, in the spirit of heroic self-discipline, you tell yourself you’ll get up in just one more minute’s time. You count the seconds backwards, five, four, three, two, one. Now it’s when you get into fractions that it becomes tricky. You know you have the self-discipline to get up very soon, but you might as well stay in bed just a fraction longer, at least until you reach the limit of your ability to do mental division.

According to Zeno’s Paradox of the Arrow, you might never have to get out of bed. Two thousand, six hundred years ago, Zeno of Elea pointed out a few problems with the common notion of time and space. He argued that a moving arrow will never get to its target. We see that it does. That’s the paradox part. The theory goes something like this: the arrow must travel half the distance to its target, and then half of that again, and so on. So in his theory, the arrow never gets to its target, and you never get out of bed.

I admit that logic isn’t my strong suit, and in my opinion, it’s overrated. I tried this argument on an employer once. He was not the type to muse, to ruminate, and consider. But I thought I had made a convincing and erudite case. He thought I should find another job.

If only we had getting-out-of-bed classes so many problems would go away. We wouldn’t need to wake up bleary eyed and grumpy. We would rise with grace and finesse. We would see each morning as a new life. All would be sweetness and light. The air would be filled with birdsong. There would be benevolence in the hearts of us all.

Come on, this is California! Some university, surely, is offering a master’s degree in Gettingoutofbedology, isn’t it?

Copyright 2006 Christopher Richards via Slow Down Now

Lazy Daisy

Check out this commercial for a narcoleptic doll. Since I have narcolepsy I'm not sure if I should be infuriated, disgusted, bemused or amazed.

A View of Sleep From The Outside

I have recent found the blog A Blog Around the Clock, who is by a fellow that goes by the name of Coturnix. He was born in Eastern Europe and when he came to America he had some interesting observations on the way American's treated sleep.

One thing I noticed upon arriving to the States is that nobody here seems to have any notion of "sleep manners". I have seen (and experienced) many times people barging into the room containing a sleeping person, switching on the lights and TV, talking, even talking to the sleeping person, all the while not being even aware that this is a Big No-No, very inconsiderate, and extremely rude. When confronted, the response is usually very defensive, stressing the person's individual right to do whatever he/she wants and not bother about being considerate about some lazy bum who is sleeping at an inappropriate time. Whoa! Stop right there!

First, individual rights are assumed to mean that you can do whatever you want as long as that does not hurt another person in some way. Waking someone up is harassment - of course it hurts someone. Second, there is no such thing as inappropriate time. If you can, you sleep whenever you can. There is no appropriate or inappropriate time. What do you do if someone is working the night-shift (like my wife often does, and I sometimes do, too)? That person will sleep during the day, so you better shut up. Third, what is this about sleeping being a sign of laziness. The "owls" are constantly being treated as lazy, though they are more likely to be sleep-deprived (cannot fall asleep until the wee hours, then being rudely awoken by the alarm clock after just a couple of hours) and spend more hours awake (and presumably productive) than "larks" do. If you are asleep, this means you need it. If you are rested enough you cannot physically remain asleep or go back to sleep again. You are wide awake. Thus, when you see someone asleep, it is because that person needs sleep right there and then. Sleep is not laziness. Laziness is "lots of front-porch picking".

Pretending that sleep-need does not exist is also institutionalized. I am not talking just about night-shifts and rotating shifts (those will kill you), night flights, being available for communication 24/7, stores open 24/7, etc - those are part of a modern society, will not go away, and we just need to learn how to adjust. I am talking about the building standards. With a huge proportion of the population working at night, why do windows have no blinds? Some old manors do, but new buildings do not. Never. Some have fake blinds, just for show, screwed into the outside walls on the sides of windows, yet cannot be closed. There are no built-in black curtains, or roll-down wooden blinds. It is difficult to find such curtains in stores if one wants to install one. What is going on? I have never seen, heard, read about, or experienced another country in the world in which sleep is not sacred, and blinds are not an essential part of a house.

I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

Perhaps not that long. It appears that we are slowly waking up to sleep problems (pun intended). More and more companies are allowing naps, and even providing nap-rooms. More and more school districts are moving high-school morning schedules later, as during teenage years, under effects of sex hormones, the circadian clocks are all temporarily "owlish". Adolescents are not crazy and lazy - they physically cannot fall asleep at a normal bed time, and physically cannot awake and feel rested early in the morning (elementary and middle school kids can, as their hormones have not surged yet).