My son rolled into the garage on his longboard, entered the house, and announced that he needed to keep a sleep journal.
For just a moment, I thought maybe he had been reading this blog. But before I could come to my senses, he quickly explained that one of his friends had described this as a tool for engaging lucid dreaming.
You may already be familiar with the idea, if not the terminology. Lucid dreams occur when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. According to one source, more than 50% of us have experienced lucid dreaming.
Some lucid dreamers attempt to initiate this ‘dream control’ while they are still awake. Not unexpectedly, these Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams are known by the acronym WILD.
Lucid dreaming, in addition to playing supporting roles in fictional films like Inception or Total Recall, has also captured the attention of scientists and psychologists since the late 1800s.
More recently, researchers found that people who play immersive video games seem to have more lucid dreams and more control over their dreams than the rest of us.
People who played immersive video games were more likely to report lucid dreams.
Of people who reported lucid dreams, gamers “never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves” but they also were able “to change perspectives from first person to observer (as if floating outside of their body)”.
Gamers didn’t code nightmares as “threatening.” Rather, they seemed to be having fun with dream situations that non-gamers coded as nightmares.
But what if you aren’t a gamer training your mind while awake to take control of an alternate dream world reality?
Some researchers have found that lucid dreaming techniques work as a treatment for those who suffer from frequent nightmares.
So maybe you’re just a run-of-the-mill dreamer who wants to explore the mind’s many states in more depth. Here are a few techniques that may be useful in facilitating lucid dreaming (from Dr. Stephen LaBerge of the Stanford University and The Lucidity Institute):
Step 1: Practice dream recall
Spending a few minutes after waking consciously focused on recalling your dreams may help focus the mind on the details of dreaming. Keeping a dream journal can be an effective technique for focusing the recall effort and training the mind, while awake, to expect to pay attention to details during dreaming.
Step 2: Identify a reality test
A reality test is something that will allow you to determine whether you are dreaming. During wakeful states, you can practice your reality test and increase the chances of recalling it while dreaming.
Tests include looking in a mirror and making a mental note to do so while dreaming. Flipping a light switch on or off and mentally noting the change in lighting or looking at the ground beneath your hands or feet. While dreaming, these tests will usually deliver odd results, such as blurry or distorted images or unexpected results (as in flipping a light switch on and the lighting does not change)…all of which may tell you you’re dreaming.
Step 3: Try to prolong the dream
Discerning that you are dreaming is one thing. But how frustrating to wake right up at the moment you are about to seize control of your dream? To prolong the dream, you might try to engage your brain in areas activated during REM sleep. One technique is to ‘spin’ your dream body. Another is to rub your dream hands together. By asking your mind to perform these tasks, LaBerge has shown in studies that 90% of dreams can be prolonged (versus a third who attempted no technique while lucidly dreaming.)
Taking control in a world that seems to defy easy explanation can be fun and empowering. Sometimes, just the effort can have that effect. That’s probably why my son is so intrigued.
Do you have an experience with lucid dreaming? Share it in the comments or take our poll.
Disorder. In medicine, a disorder is a condition that interferes with normal functioning. And Webster’s has one broad definition that includes ‘a disturbance of the peace’. I think I’ll use that one the next time my son cranks his music up as I wind down in the evening.
But when it comes to sleeping disorders, it seems that disorderly conduct is nearly the norm. In fact, according to the Sleep Wellness Institute, more than 100 million Americans suffer some form of sleeping disorder.
Some of the most common disorders are:
Sleep apnea: Approximately 18 million Americans suffer from Sleep Apnea. According to the Sleep Wellness Institute, around 38,000 people die each year, due to complications from the disorder.
Insomnia: An estimated 60 million Americans suffer from insomnia regularly
Some conditions, like Sleep Apnea, can have more immediate life and death complications. For others, like insomnia, it is the chronic accumulation of poor, restless sleep that does the dirty work on our minds and bodies.
And with so many of us apparently disordered and discombobulated when it comes to healthy and happy sleep, you can rest assured that there are many solutions waiting to be sold to cure us. Some of them may actually work.
Here are three big things (and seven smaller things) you might wish to consider first:
Research your symptoms: The first step toward understanding is…knowledge. Check out the links for each of the conditions above. If it sounds like what’s keeping you from sound sleep you’ll be in a much better position to evaluate solutions that work for you.
Get tested promptly: Some testing you can do on your own…keeping a sleep journal, for example, can provide you or your doctor with data about your condition. Other testing, such as for Sleep Apnea or Narcolepsy, may require something more formal like bloodwork or a sleep study.
Practice the persistent pursuit of sleep: Many sleeping disorders result from chronic factors such as stress, diet, or lifestyle. Here are seven best practices to pursue on your own or in concert with the guidance of a health professional
Maintain a regular bed- and waketime schedule
Exercise regularly, but try to complete your exercise at least two hours prior to bedtime
Limit bedtime eating to light and healthy snacks
Paint or decorate your room in colors that soothe you
Within your comfort zone, try to ensure that your room is dark, cool and that the air circulates while you sleep
Establish a night time routine that may include a warm bath, reading, or soft music
Clear your mind of tomorrow’s to-do’s by making a list of things you must do…before going to bed.
Have you suffered from a sleeping disorder? Take our poll or share your experiences in the comments.
And sleepwalking, though occurring in a different phase of sleep, moves us one somnabulistic step closer to full body physical participation in the mind’s sleep-time reality.
But what if these mind-body boundary breaches during sleep told us something about the physical health of the brain?
A link between violent dreams and disease?
In at least one case, REM Sleep Behavioral Disorder (RBD), researchers think that might be the case. With RBD, sleepers kick, punch, scream or generally thrash about violently during REM sleep, and often awake to vivid memories of violent dream sequences that compelled such physical activity.
Beyond the obvious physical peril to bedmates of such a dreamer, recent research suggests this type of sleep may forecast the development of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia several decades in advance.
Researchers at Mayo Clinic studied the records of patients with RBD and found that nearly two-thirds who developed a neurodegenerative disease had experienced the onset of REM Sleep Behavior disorder at least 15 years earlier.
One more thing to lose sleep over?
Research like this may compel some to ponder the following question: My [self/child/spouse/significant other] regularly thrashes about during the night while asleep…should I have them examined for neurological disease?
The results of this study seem to identify a link between a sleeping disorder and neurological disease, but there is much yet to be known about how the mind and body work together: during sleep AND while awake.
The researchers readily admit that they have no idea what percentage of RBD sufferers will eventually develop Parkinson’s or dementia. In addition, the underlying causes of RBD, Parkinson’s, and dementia are not well understood–making the link between them worthy of further exploration.
A person could wander through life losing sleep over a series of research-study-inspired worries. But another view is that research on possible linkages between sleep behavior and disease may ultimately help us sleep better: By knowing we have a potentially more complete and useful set of criteria for early diagnosis of, and intervention in, neurological diseases.
What do you think? Do you have thoughts or experiences with dreaming, sleep walking or other sleep states that involve unconscious physical movement? Please share them in the comments.
Surely you’ve run across one of those people who seems to be up and about before most sane people would ever dream of even hitting the snooze button.
Who knows maybe you are one of them? I’ve been accused by co-workers, friends and family members of just such behavior. Turns out, I may be a mutant…or a mouse.
In the journal Science, a paper (here) reported findings suggesting that some people with habitually shorter sleep lengths may have a mutation in the Transcriptional repressor DEC2. Which is another way of saying, they may sleep less because they have a genetic mutation (as opposed to sleeping less due to temporary factors like work deadlines, school tests, caffeine, or random car alarms in the night).
credit: zingbeauty.com
If the average American gets 7.4 hours of sleep on nonworkdays (according to the Sleep Foundation, here), then we sleep mutants might be expected to regularly survive on about 3/4 of that.
Of course, surviving and thriving are two completely different qualitative experiences. So before you chalk up a regular lack of sleep to some genetic destiny, you should probably be sure that behavioral factors are not the primary cause of your sleep-less-ness. For instance, short sleeping–and long sleeping–tends to occur in families. If you are the only early riser in your family, well, you may want to leave open the possibility that it’s not in your genes.
The effect was also notable in that sleep onset times (i.e., bedtimes) were not substantially different between short and long sleepers. So, getting up early is what separates the mutants from the non-mutants.
Lastly, the study confirms a portion of its conclusions on results from mouse studies. So unless you have an extremely uncommon fondness for cheese (Wisconsonians excepted), you might want to rule out behavioral causes before getting comfortable with a lack of sleep (see prior post on 8 steps to getting 8 hours of sleep,here).
Do you or anyone in your family consistently get less than 8 hours of sleep per night–and thrive? Feel free to share your stories of suspected sleep mutants in the comments!
Class schedule…check. Roommates’ mobile number…check. Clothing, furnishings, and study supplies…check, check, and check. Towels and bedsheets…check and check.
As summer break winds down, many college students (or their parents!) review a checklist as they prepare for the annual migration back to school. For many, the ritual journey forward starts with excitement about making new friends, the prospect of studying hard (or at least having to study), and living away from home in college housing…dorms, apartments, fraternity and sorority houses.
But whether you’ll bring your own bed or grab whatever comes with the place you’ll stay, you might want to put bed bug awareness on the back-to-school checklist.
Bed bugs: They’re not just for hotels anymore.
While headlines scream about big city hotels being overrun by the blood-thirsty critters, the mobile society in which we all live means bed bugs are an increasing problem anywhere groups of humans share space… like dorms, apartments and housing for members of the Greek system.
We’ve posted about spotting these mattress dwelling vampires and what to do about them (here).
But like any good lecture class, here are some notes to review:
Wash your sheets.
We know, mom’s not there to do your laundry for you every week. So go ahead and wear those jeans four or five times between washings. But wash your sheets weekly. Though hot water won’t kill bed bugs, the agitation of the machine and the detergent will rinse them out of your sheets, mattress cover and pillow casings. Washing them weekly helps knock them down before they can create their own fraternity in your bed.
Consider a mattress encasement product.
If it’s your mattress, an encasement product (like Protect-a-bed) will help keep your mattress bed bug free. So when you take the mattress back home next summer–or off to your own space after graduation—you won’t be carrying these pesky roommates with you. If it’s an existing mattress, a mattress encasement product can help isolate any of these pests that may be lurking inside the mattress…and away from you (no, you can’t use one of these on an annoying human roommate).
Look for the signs.
Bed bugs bite and that’s often the first sign you may have a problem. If you see patterns of multiple bites, you may have a bed bug infestation. And if your roommate has a problem with bed bug bites, you could have one too if left untreated.
If you suspect bed bugs, notify your RA/House Leader or apartment manager…they should be able to help you get an appropriate exterminator.
With a few simple precautions, you can reduce the risk that bed begs will distract you from what you went to college to do…including studying.
Have an experience with bed bugs? Feel free to leave a comment.
Do you sometimes feel as if parts of your body have a mind of their own?
Take for instance your legs. You can be sitting there in one position, minding your social media business or gleefully watching the Real Desperate Housewives of New Jersey pull each other’s hair out. You shift your position and, voila’, your leg ‘wakes up’ sending a prickly, tingling announcement that you interrupted a sleep you didn’t even know was taking place.
Of course, we’ve all had our arms or legs ‘fall asleep’ on us at some point. But what if the problem was reversed? What if your legs and arms kept the rest of you up at night? And not just once in a great while, but routinely? You may be surprised to learn that as many as 1 in 10 Americans suffer from just such a condition.
Restless leg syndrome (RLS), also known as Wittmaack-Ekborn’s syndrome (or the less formal, jango leg), results in an almost irresistible urge to move one’s limbs to stop sensations variously described as ‘itching’, ‘electrical’, ‘antsy’ or ‘creepy-crawly’.
The National Institutes of Health indicates that the condition seems to worsen with relaxation and rest and, as one might expect, at night.
What gives?
Researchers have identified two forms of RLS: Primary, which appears to be hereditary, often manifests itself before age 40 and gets progressively worse with time; and Secondary, which is believed to be caused by a separate underlying condition, usually occurs after age 40 and can have sudden onset.
Recent studies reveal that nearly 60% of RLS cases run in families. Women appear twice as likely as men to report RLS symptoms, though it can affect anyone. Other factors often implicated in RLS include a variety of mineral and vitamin deficiencies, pregnancy, peripheral neuropathy and diet.
What to do?
While there is currently no cure for RLS, in most cases, the symptoms can be controlled through lifestyle changes, such as diet and exercise, and in some cases medical treatments. If you or someone you love is having difficulty getting sleep because of symptoms that resemble RLS, the usual advice applies: see your doctor!
Some people with RLS will not seek medical attention, believing that they will not be taken seriously, that their symptoms are too mild, or that the condition is not treatable. Some health care professionals inaccurately attribute the symptoms to nervousness, insomnia, stress, arthritis, muscle cramps or aging.
Numerous online references to home remedies don’t help sufferers in search of serious diagnostics either. Google alone returns more than 600,000 results claiming an unwrapped bar of soap placed between the mattress and bedsheets works wonders! (example here)
But when something routinely disrupts your ability to get 6-8 hours of healthy sleep a night, it’s a matter of physical and mental health that’s worth treating seriously. Hopefully, increasing awareness of RLS will facilitate informed conversations between trained medical professionals (no offense to Grandma’s Home Remedies!) and those travelling the road to better, whole body sleep.
Do you or someone you know suffer from RLS? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
It doesn’t really matter if you’re an elite athlete training for your 10th IronMan or if you’re a weekend warrior eyeing your first 5K or 10K race. The Wall is that legendary moment that can creep up on anyone. The moment when the spirit suddenly sags and the body screams at the mind “No Mas!”
Scaling The Wall requires a plan.
If you’re training for an event that will push you toward your limits, you probably have a training plan–or at least an idea of one. A detailed plan might include scheduled workouts, goal times, and maybe even nutrition specifics. For others, a plan might take the form of an informal list of interim steps designed to get you across the finish line. In either case, the training plan should factor in 6-8 hours of sleep.
The physiology is pretty basic: Muscles have a limited ability to store fuel for immediate, efficient use. Glycogen, the quick fuel created from carbohydrates, gets used first…the secondary fuel, fat, requires oxygen. Which is great, except that oxygen gets to be in short supply as your body approaches its limits.
And it’s not just your muscles. The brain uses glycogen for energy to keep you sharp and able to concentrate…and as athletes like Lance Armstrong remind us, the brain power and attitude required to fight off the The Wall is every bit as important as the brawn power of your muscles.
Sleep helps keep you fueled because glycogen is stored in the muscles and brain during slow wave sleep. Even moderate sleep deprivation reduces the amount of glycogen available to you. Which means it really is possible to do part of your training in your sleep!
You’ve taken the challenge to push yourself: planning to get adequate sleep can help you build a supply of positive attitude—and glycogen–to help you smash through the wall.
Have a personal experience with The Wall or the effect of sleep on athletic performance? Feel free to share it in the comments.
More information on:
Studies on impact of sleep deprivation on mental [1, 2] and physical performance [1, 2]
Ah summertime. That sultry season which holds the prospect of a vacation…or, perhaps, the now-popular variant known as a staycation.
But whether here or there, beach or backporch, long weekend or multi-week journey, the summer session presents many of us with a chance to catch up on some serious leisure reading. Fiction or biography, nonfiction or business, paperback, hardcover or eReader.
The idea of a settling down with a good book is a summertime tradition. But with more than 26,000 books in print and many more in libraries and online, choosing your title can be the hardest part.
Sure, you could scour the three authors who seem to make up the New York Times best seller list, or you could attack the problem in a thematically random way…like, say, choosing from novels that tackle a theme of sleep or dreams!
Along that line, here’s a quick list of 5 novels to get you started. They each play, loosely in some cases, on literary interpretations of sleep and dreams.
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939): The classic detective-noir novel from 1939, which introduced the world to detective Philip Marlowe. Sleep, in this instance, being a metaphor for death…it’s a detective novel afterall!
The Little Sleep, Paul Tremblay (2009): A modern-day re-take on Chandler’s Depression-era classic, this debut detective novel follows a Boston cop who falls asleep in the middle of conversations…which makes evidence gathering a bit, um, subjective. If you like this, you might also like No Sleep til Wonderland, Tremblay’s 2nd installment.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick (1968): The novel that spawned the Bladerunner movie, this sci-fi masterpiece answers the title’s question in an all-too-human denoument that was left on the film’s cutting room floor.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had to, DC Piersen (2010). What would happen if a teenage outsider, obsessed with cyborgs and sci-fi, confided in his friend that he never sleeps…ever? What would happen to that secret if the friends have a falling out over a girl? If finding out the answers in a witty way sounds appealing, you might like this more-complex-than-the-title-implies novel.
The House of Sleep, Jonathon Coe (1999). Like the sometimes confusing connection between dream and wake states, this novel presents a complexly layered narrative about four students who revisit their ‘dorm’—now a sleep disorder clinic– after more than a decade. Witty—in the British manner and setting of the novel and it’s characters.
Do you have a favorite read of your own? Share it with us in the comments!
Philosophers as far back as Aristotle and Descartes consistently wrote about the colors of their dreams. For many of us though, a popular opinion may have formed that we mostly dream in black and white.
During the mid 1900’s, when black and white media dominated, those who swore they dreamt in color were classified by researchers and psychologists as outliers: rainbow-colored dreams were explained away as wishful additions of the mind applied during recollection of the dream.
Heading into the 1960’s, as color TV, movies and print became more prevalent, those who remembered their dreams as black and white or fuzzy shades of gray, were greeted with the inverse: perhaps we dreamt in color, but, like old Polaroid photos, color was the first attribute to fade from the scene when we pulled our dream memories out of storage the next morning.
So which is it? Do we collectively hallucinate about the color of our dreams? Is there a simple answer in black and white? Or do the answers come in shades of gray…or chartreuse?
One study sought to look into cultural differences: does one’s exposure to black and white media (movies, TV) influence the color of ones dreams? The answer would seem to be not really. Afterall, our exposure to the outside world is full color, how would a black and white movie change all that? And novels, for instance, don’t identify the color of every element of the scene. Yet somehow we fill in the color of the scene in our minds.
So do we or don’t we?
The likely answers may lie in the physical processes of memory and physics.
Isaac Newton suggested that, physically speaking, color was an illusion that arose in the mind. The actual electromagnetic spectrum absorbed by the visual structures of the eye being little more than variations in frequency and energy. It took a brain to interpret those variations as a warm red or cool blue for instance. So a colorized dream would have to conform to the same physical laws.
Oliver Sacks, in his book An Anthropologist on Mars, documented a patient who lost his color vision in an auto accident. Previously a vivid color dreamer, his brain injury eliminated color from both his wakeful and dream memories, suggesting the link between neurological processes and memory.
So if color is the result of cooperation between visual and neural systems, then it is reasonable that this same kind of neural-memory relationship is responsible for color—or lack of it—in our dreams. Color, it would seem, is in the eye–and the dreams–of the beholder!
What about you? Do you dream in color? Take our poll or leave a comment.
The NHL, the NBA, MLB…FIFA. The governing bodies of many major sports have made at least one thing in common…the extended championships series. And as these world- and continent-spanning series play out live into the wee hours of the night…or kickoff before the sun rises…avid supporters are sometimes left with little time for sleep.
Cutting your sleep short one night to catch the final minutes of your team’s away game isn’t likely to cause much havoc. We’re talking here about the extended series. The kind that, in some sports, can span weeks. The kind where being a faithful fan can mean more than a little daytime drowsiness.
For instance, timezone shifts are an obvious way in which these series can play havoc with normal sleep cycles. But being a fanatic, er, fan, can also mean being emotionally invested in the outcome…and over an extended period, that emotional rollercoaster can have a cumulative impact on the quantity—and quality—of sleep.
And though you might not think watching a game would be physically demanding, intense viewing on the edge of your seat might create or aggravate posture-related pain that can defer your championship sleep even further.
Granted, some might find watching certain sports a sleep aid, but for the fanatics among us, we must take care to protect our hard-earned sleep victories. So what’s one to do when the prospect of a week’s worth of excitement—and cumulative sleep deprivation–appears? Here are a few common sense reminders to help navigate the extended series with minimal sleep impact:
Try to avoid using caffeine beyond your normal levels. If you’re going to be staying up a couple extra hours to watch a series over several days or weeks, best not to use caffeine as a way to get there. Try naps instead.
Talk to friends or fellow fans while watching…the rollercoaster of emotions can last long after the last whistle blows…if you’re at home, try texting, Twittering, or social media updates as a way to relieve some of the tension that close matches can bring. Surrounding yourself with other fans can help you get the thrill of victory—or the agony of defeat—to a manageable level before you get to bed.
Take a break during commercials or stoppages in play…you’re in the zone, watching intently. Give your body a break and get up, walk around, or use the bathroom.
Avoid overindulgening in alcohol and food…focusing on the game can make it easy to lose count of your consumption…make a special effort to maintain moderation so you can go the distance.
Have fun. Remember, you’re a fan win or lose.
Soccer fans (or if you prefer, Futbol supporters) should avoid using Vuvuzelas at all times outside of the stadium.
What about you? Have you ever lost sleep over your team? Share your story in the comments.
