Have you ever considered how utterly weird sleep is?
We do it daily, willingly abandoning consciousness because that's how we're hardwired, and enter a restful yet restless world we barely remember. If you ever stop and think about it, sleep is utterly weird.
We spend a significant proportion of our lives out cold, maybe a quarter to a third of our time on Earth. Average life expectancy may be 81 but if you factor out the part we spend asleep it's more like 56. That's a lot of potential experience we're missing out on.
All us mammals do it, from koalas who sleep 22 hours a day to elephants who barely do two. It's a critical part of how biology works. And yet even though humans have mastered all kinds of other conditions we've never found a way to avoid sleep, not long term, because the need for sleep ultimately defeats us.
Sleep is essential for restitution, allowing various biological processes to reset our cells and prepare us for tomorrow. We can't fight it, not forever, and get tetchier the longer we try to stave it off. But if we try to sleep too early we can't nod off because we're not really in control of when we sleep, our bodies are.
Over millennia our bodies have adapted to a circadian rhythm, sleeping at night so we can make best use of daylight hours. These cycles also nudge us to be tired at night and, if undisturbed, wake us at a roughly regular time unaided. We can't fight against it, it's evolution.
Of an evening, every evening, we willingly head for a mattress and lie down until we lose consciousness. It's so weird how we all consent to this, tens of thousands of times, with no idea of what we look like, what we're doing and what's going on around us until we wake up.
We have no direct control over falling asleep, not without pharmaceutical assistance. You can't lie there and flip a switch, it either happens or it doesn't, and the best we can do is create conditions that make dropping off most likely. A restful run-up, a pillow, the lights off, soothing sounds or silence, empty thoughts, whatever, or just general exhaustion in the hope it's tired us out.
You never, ever remember the moment of falling asleep, despite the fact you've done it more times than you've had hot dinners. Sleep is a hole you fall into without ever noticing, or get increasingly frustrated about if it doesn't happen.
Waking up, however, is something we have gained control over. The alarm clock rouses us on cue, which is slightly more reliable than expecting someone else to do it for us. Its existence has also enabled society to impose a working day on its citizens, there no longer being any excuse for not being punctual in the morning.
Dreams are weird, relentlessly so, as is the fact we dream at all. Throughout the night we enter manic visual sequences, often dramatic, invariably improbable, but only remember some of the action if we happen to wake in the middle.
While we're dreaming it's like these events are actually happening to us, be that meeting a long-lost relative or falling off a cliff. The adrenalin rush during the wilder episodes must be insane. If anyone ever invents the technology to download our dreams and replay them to us while we're awake, Hollywood is over.
We organise our lives around a working day that matches daylight hours and a quiet period overnight when the vast majority of the population is asleep. Imagine how different everything would be if the majority of our economic and recreational activity wasn't focused into a smaller proportion of the day.
We sleep most when we're young but neither consistently or reliably, which can make parenting absolute hell. Babies are notorious for not sleeping when you'd like them to, also for screaming loudly when awake, all of which contributes to making parents stressed and seriously sleepless themselves. If infant sleep patterns weren't so fractious, maybe we'd have more children.
We organise our homes around sleep. A special room where we can lose consciousness, often several rooms so nobody gets disturbed. If it weren't for sleep we could all live in smaller houses, costing less and occupying less space, maybe even solve the housing crisis altogether. It really does rule our lives.
We have many weaknesses, our species, but one is that we all need to be unconscious for lengthy intervals. It's driven our need for shelter to make nobody attacks us overnight, protecting us not just from predators but from criminals and miscreants. We all need a lock on the door to make sure nobody intrudes while we can't notice.
We spend a lot of money decorating our bedrooms to make them look nice, then only use them for a narrow proportion of the day and spend most of our time unconscious with the light off. Transatlantic flights are an even bigger waste of money, where the more you spend the easier it is to sleep and miss all the luxurious service you've paid so much for.
The hotel business exists mainly because we have to sleep. When away from home it's important to have somewhere to fall unconscious, ideally in comfort, and then be overcharged for breakfast in the morning. If we didn't need to sleep we could mostly make do with left luggage instead.
Our mealtimes all revolve around the fact we need to sleep and that most of us do that simultaneously. Breakfast kickstarts us, lunch is often the light meal midway between sleeps and dinner is the stodgier one we eat later so we can sleep it off. Hospitality wouldn't work so efficiently if we could all drop in any time.
Someone needs to work overnight, and those who accept the challenge have to fight against their bodies' natural desire to sleep. Shift workers have the toughest of battles, notionally adapting but never quite in sync, and all because sleep punishes those unable to fit the norm.
Every night we go to sleep on the understanding there's a tiny tiny probability we won't wake up. It hasn't happened yet or you wouldn't be reading this but it always could. Some say it's the best way to go but who's to say, given that nobody can come back and tell us what it's like. Sleep may one day claim us but we still sleep anyway, we've no choice.
Sleep shapes our lives, forces us to comply, creates the maddest nightmares and makes us ignorant of a third of our existence. Sleep delights some and is feared by others, especially by those who regularly fail to achieve it. Sleep is a horizon we cross daily, a state of mind, a necessity, an escape.
But mainly sleep is utterly weird, and we hardly ever consider how utterly weird it is.
