Reflection on Sleep

No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap. -Carrie Snow

SLEEP! The average person spends one third of their life sleeping. Of course this calculation varies, but as an average number, one third of your life is quiet significant; if you live until you are seventy five, you have spent twenty five years sleeping (or only fifty years awake). Initially this realization can be quiet disheartening to someone who really enjoys sleeping but I believe there is a lot to gain from spending more time in bed. Nothing feels more satisfying than falling asleep or as nasty as burning out not being able to get to your bed.

Some people think that staying in bed isn’t productive or that sleeping in wastes your day…I bed to differ. Half my day dreaming is done on the Toronto Transit, the other half when I am lying in bed. Day dreaming is something I have always been exceptionally good at and when put to use produces quality ideas (which may or may not be acted upon in the future). I think people need to see the importance of slowing down and actually taking the time to visualize, create, and imagine the infinity of possibilities that exists in our minds. Jumping out of bed to an alarm clock every morning, as oppose to waking up slow, doesn’t leave time for reflection or emotion – it is more mechanical than human. We all have good ideas; not everybody takes the time to realize it.

Everyone dreams, yet, dream consciousness is a mystery; although it can be explained how we dream, there is no explanation as to why we dream. The perceptual images we experience while we are asleep feel so similar to our waking consciousness but the time it takes to perceive them (without physical sensory) is infinitely quicker.

I heard an interesting theory regarding dream consciousness. They say after death, once everything is shutdown, there is still up to twelve minutes of brain activity. If you have ever fallen back to sleep in the morning and had a long elaborate dream only to wake up a minute later then you have experienced the raw relativity of time. Time as we know it in our waking life seems finite but when you are asleep the relative rules of time do not apply. Twelve minutes of dream consciousness could be enough time for limitless existence.

When you are asleep the rules of time don’t apply and therefore there will be a lot more time to spend sleeping.