What Is a Good Night's Sleep?

What Is a Good Night's Sleep?

Let's define the perfect snooze. Like many people, you may be so used to your own sleep patterns, however imperfect, that you don't know what you might be missing.

For most people, the best sleep takes eight hours, runs from dark to dawn – ideally from ten p.m. Or earlier to six a.m. or so – and leaves you feeling great. You should actually start to feel sleepy within about three hours after the sun sets as your sleep-promoting brain chemicals are triggered by by the reduced light. When you actually hit the pillow, it should take only a few minutes for you to get to sleep. Once you get to sleep, you should stay asleep through the night (without bathroom trips!). Ideally, you'll go through a series of vital sleep sequences that take at least eight hours to complete (children need twelve hours). At least six of those hours should be ininterrupted.

There are five stages of sleep that constitute a sleep cycle, and you need to go through four to five sleep cycles in one night. You'll usually pass through the first two superficial sleep stages in your first half hour of sleep. Then, hopefully, you'll drop into two progressively deeper sleep stages and stay there for most of the next few hours. This first half of the night, literally between ten p.m. and two a.m., potentially provides the most restorative sleep, because only while you sleep deeply can your immune system, your growth hormones, and other repair crews emerge to heal your body from the day's ravages. Finally, you dream in the REM (rapid eye movement) stage, which seems to be designed particularly for psychic repair. These five stages repeat throughout the night, though the second half of the night has more rapid ups, downs, and dreams than the first half.

If you sleep poorly, your mind and body are deprived of crucial cellular repairs that can be made only if you sleep long and deeply. You know what happens when you can't bring your car into the shop for its routine maintenance? You run it into the ground and shorten its “life span”. Same thing here. So you should find out what's really keeping you up. But first let's get clear on what your particular sleep disturbance looks like.

In desperation we look into the hoary old idea of remote-controlled mining. Photo by Elena.

What is your sleeplessness like?

Do you sleep habits include any of the following basic flows?:

Are you a night owl? If so, like many people, you may not think that you have a sleep disturbance at all. You may actually consider your late nights a blessing. It can be fun – you get things done, you get some time alone when everyone else is asleep (unless you've spawned some baby night owls). But it's not fun in the morning if you need to get up so early that you can't get a full eight hours of sleep. Chances are, you are chronically undersleeping and feeling out of sync with your spouse – and the rest of the world. Being a night owl is a key symptom of either abnormally low serotonin or excessively high stress-coping hormones.

On the other hand, you may lie awake in frustration most nights for too long. Do you go over and over worries about the past day or the next day before you can finally get to sleep? Or do you just lie there? Do anxiety, pain, panic, or disturbing dreams wake you up in the night or too early in the morning? Or do you take too long to get back to sleep or not get back to sleep at all? Are you a restless, thrashing sleeper or a light one? Do you wake up at the slightest sounds?

Are you proud to call yourself a “morning person” who wakes up very early no matter what time you get to sleep?

Do you rarely get more than six hours of sleep a night? Do you wake up worried or anxious and have to get up and exercise or work on whatever is bothering you? Finally, are you one of the four million poorly adjusted shift workers who try to sleep during the day? Whatever part of your night's sleep you're missing, you should think about it.

Why aren't you getting enough sleep?

If you answered yeas to any of the above questions, you are likely to ave at least one deficiency in your body's sleep-producing chemistry. Let's start with the most common cause of sleep disturbance. It has to do with the brain chemical serotonin. But serotonin is an antidepressant, you might be thinking, what does it have to do with sleep? What you may not know is that this extraordinary biochemical mood marvel is also the only substance from which your brain can produce its most potent knockout drop: melatonin.

Your sleep is supposed to be induced by a biochemical concert that features gradually increasing levels of melatonin, starting in the afternoon and reaching crescendo at about ten p.m. Melatonin is produced out of serotonin by your pineal gland, a pea-size structure embedded deep within your brain. The pineal gland, which consists of pigment cells similar to those found in your eyes, is light sensitive. Very gradually throughout the afternoon a and evening, as light gives way to darkness, the transformation of serotonin into melatonin is supposed to increase until it lullabies you to sleep. But here's the catch: Melatonin can be produced in adequate amount only if you have enough serotonin on hand from which to make it.

(From The Mood Cure, by Julia Ross, m.a. Author of the Diet Cure).

We can't appreciate the condition of sleep. Photo by Elena.

To Build a World

To Build a World

By Poul Anderson

Fifty floors down, the elevator let him out into a lobby, small and empty despite its polished marble. “Blastula,“ he muttered, « I'd hoped this was a hotel.” But no. You couldn't get away with as much in a hotel as you could in a soundproofed apartment. Baccioco probably maintained a number of those, around the planet. Sevigny debated whether to borrow someone's phone here. If he left this exit unwatched, his enemies could get away before the police arrived.

On the other hand, if he hung around they might well find some way to recapture him. And as for their escape, come to think of it, men as prominent as Baccioco and – he supposed – Gupta couldn't disappear. Rashid didn't matter, was little more than a tool. And he found himself hoping a bit that Maura would go free.

Oscar made comforting noises on his shoulder.

He walked out onto the street. It was wide and softly lit, lined with tall residential buildings. An occasional car went by, the whisper of its air cushion blending with the warm breeze that rustled in palm fronds. He was high above the ocean, which he glimpsed at the edge of the city glitter beneath. The Moon was no longer in sight, but he made our a few stars.

Where was the nearest public phone? He chose an eastward course arbitrarily and began striding. His buskins thudded; the slight jar and the sense of kinesthesia helped shake a little tightness out of him. But his skin was still wet, his stink sharp against a background of jasmine, his nerves still taut.

At the end of the block a pedestrian belt lifted him over the street. From the top of its arc he spied some glowsigns to the north, and headed that way. Before long he reached a cluster of shops. They were closed for the night, but even in his hurry he lost a few seconds gaping at their display windows. Was that much luxury possible on an Earth that everyone called impoverished? Wait. Remember your history classes. Inordinate wealth for a few has always gone along with inordinate want for the many. Because the many no longer have the economic strength to resist -

That recalled him to his purpose. There was a booth at the corner. He went in, fumbled for a half dollar and dropped the coin in the slot. The screen lit. He needed a minute to figure out how the system worked. On Venus and Luna they used radio for distance calls, intercoms when indoors. Finally he punched the button marked Directory and spelled out POLICE on the alphabet keys. A set of station numbers appeared. He dialed.

A face and a pair of uniformed shoulder came to view. “Honolulu Central. Can I help you?”

“I want to, report a theft and a kidnapping,” Sevigny said. It felt odd not to be telling his troubles to a clan elder.

The voice and eyes sharpened. “Where are you?”

Sevigny peered out at the signs and read the off. “I don't know where the nearest station would be. I'm stranger here.”

We are strangers here. Photo by Elena.

The Critique of Impure Reason

The Critique of Impure Reason

By Poul Anderson

The robot entered so quietly, for all his bulk, that Felix Tunny didn't hear. Bent over his desk, the man was first aware of the intruder when a shadow came between him and the fluoreceil. Then a last footfall quivered the floor, a vibration that went through Tunny's chair and into his bones. He whirled, choking on a breath, and saw the blueblack shape like a cliff above him. Eight feet up, the robot's eyes glowed angry crimson in a faceless helmet of a head.

A voice like a great gong reverberated through the office: “My, but you look silly.”

“What the devil are you doing?” Tunny yelped.

“Wandering about,” said Robot IZK-99 airily. “Hither and yon, yon and hither. Observing life. How deliciously right Brochet is!”

“Huh?” said Tunny. The fog of data, estimates, and increasingly frantic calculations was only slowly clearing from his head.

IZK-99 extended an enormous hand to exhibit a book.

Tunny read “The Straw and the Bean: a Novel of Modern Youth by Truman Brochet on the front. The back of the dust jacket was occupied by a coloripic of the author, who had bangs and delicate lips. Deftly, the robot flipped the book open and read aloud:

“Worms”, she said. “That's what they are, worms, that's what we-uns all are, Billy Chile, worms that grew a spine an' a brain way back in the Obscene or the Messyzoic or whenever it was.” Even in her sadness Ella Mae must always make her sad little jokes, which saddened me still more on this day of said rain and dying, magnolia blossoms. “We don't want them”, she said. “Backbones and brains, I mean, honey. They make us stiff and topheavy, so we can't lie down no more and be just nothing ay-tall but worms.”

“Take off your clothes,” I yawned.

“What has that got to do with anything?” Tunny asked.

“If you do not understand,” said IZK-99 coldly, “there is no use in discussing it with you. I recommend that you read Arnold Roach's penetrating critical essay on this book. It appeared in the last issue of  “Pierce, Arrow!” The Magazine of Penetrating Criticism. He devotes four pages to analyzing the various levels of meaning in that exchange between Ella Mae and Billy Chile.”  

“Ooh,” Tunny moaned. “Isn't it enough I've got a hangover, a job collapsing under me because of you, and a fight with my girl, but you have to mention that rag?”

“How vulgar you are. It comes from watching stereovision.” The robot sat down in a chair, which creaked alarmingly under his weight, crossed his legs and leafed through his book. The other hand lifted a rose to his chemosensor. “Exquisite,” he murmured.

“You don't imagine I”d sink to reading what the call fiction these days, do you?” Tunny sneered, with a feeble hope of humiliating him into going to work. “Piddling little experiments in the technique of describing more and more complicated ways to feel sorry for yourself – what kind of entertainment is that for a man?”

The race needs love, to be sure. Illustration by Elena.

Pusha

Pusha, various images from the past and the present

Push - selfie.

Timeless Existence

Timeless Existence

As we learn to open our hearts, we have the opportunity to reside in love, compassion , joy and equanimity – what the Dzogchen masters call “spontaneous equalness.” Heart-opening leads to the experience of freedom and the “truth of the heart.” Dzogchen is profoundly in favor of heart-opening and experiencing this transcendent flow of loving awareness, but it also recognizes that one has a head, a brain, a mind, and, above all, limitless awareness. It is this awareness (which is who you are) that will not be peaceful and satisfied until it has achieved its potential, satisfied its inner need and drive, and expanded into the spaciousness of timeless existence.

Other forms of Buddhism are-heart-centered and emphasize, first, the teachings of the “Four Noble Truths” and the “Eightfold Way” to escape suffering and achieve liberation or freedom, as taught by Buddha in the Deer Park. And, secondarily, the Bohisattva path comprises emptiness and compassion for the removal of suffering for all sentient beings. Dzogchen offers a third path where we have the opportunity to experience the truth of the heart in addition to the ultimate freedom, the truth of the universe. I am finally learning to travel that blessed path each night at bedtime, and each morning as I awaken, in gratitude.

I am convinced that timeless awareness and spaciousness is our goal. If that is too big a step, however, there is always gratitude, which is everyone's salvation. If we can awaken in the morning and, instead of feeling fear or resentment, give thanks to God – or the organizing principle of the universe that gives us our good health and our good minds – we are well on the way to peace and freedom. We are actually giving thanks for grace – the unsolicited gifts we have all been given. I have found that while I am in a state of gratitude, it is impossible for me to be unhappy.

While we cannot always control the events around us, we do have power over how we experience those events. At any moment, we can individually and collectively affect the course of our lives by choosing to direct our attention to the aspect of ourselves that is aware and, through the practice of self-inquiry, tl awareness itself. We can as, “Who is aware?” and then, “Who wants to know?” The choice of where we put our attention is ultimately our most powerful freedom. Our choice of attitude and focus affects not only our own perceptions and experiences, but also the experiences and behaviors of others.

(Excerpt from Limitless Mind, a Guide to remote viewing and transformation of consciousness, by Russell Targ, author of Miracles of Mind. New World Library, California, 2004).

Timeless awareness is our goal. Illustration by Elena.