Question for Terra (and anyone else who wants to answer)

[sheila]

Originally Posted by Mandi

The trick to side sleeping is a pillow between your knees, and one for your upper arm to rest upon - the now popular body pillows are one way to do it, but I actually prefer two pillows myself, the better with which to customize. This lets your top leg and arm rest fairly level, without putting undue strain on the lower shoulder or hip.

That is how I sleep, with one of those body pillows my honey got for me a few years back. I squish it all up so it fits just as good as two separate pillows.

[Dunx]

We've got body pillows for our cats. They're stuffed with catnip, and the cats will hug them with their front legs and scratch at them mightily with their back legs.

Cats don't need pillows to sleep.

[Andilinks]

This belongs here and is a good read if you're interested in sleep patterns etc.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...an-early-riser

From Daypop

[Evoir]

Ok, joining this thread late....

I used to require 12 hours sleep... until Miss Rose came along. Now, I'm good at around 6. Occassionally I sleep 8 or 9 on a Sunday. I have hardley ever used an alarm clock, only those few years when I have had a J*O*B where I had to be somewhere at 8 am or at 4 am (I was a baker for a few years). Oh, and a 1 year old is a great natural clock. But, I am finding some freedom in needing less sleep.... There is more time to spend with Rose, more time to get work done. It's like I was sleeping too much of my life away before. I'm quite happy about it.

It's great to hear how other people deal with sleep. It's been on my mind lately.

[Evoir]

Did I say 12 hours of sleep? That's not true. That was on a weekend.... I used to require 8-10 hours of sleep. Now, I can operate on 6-8. (except when posting on a web forum!)

[Melissa]

Interesting article(s), Andi. Thanks!

Although I have trouble stopping to go to bed sometimes, I absolutely love love love to sleep. Not one of those that looks at it as a waste of time. Quite the opposite. More of a chance to rebuild and renew. Very active dreamer so that probably has something to do with the enjoyment of it as well.

--Gimme 6-8 and I'm happy.

[kitchin]

I've been telling everybody about this article, which says sleeping four hours, waking up for an hour or two, and then sleeping four more may be more natural than "seemless" sleep. I found a Google cache of it here:
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache...ient=firefox-a

[Review of: "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" by A. Roger Ekirch (Norton; $25.95).]
CARPE NOCTEM
by ARTHUR KRYSTAL
A little night history.
The New Yorker, May 30, 2005

...What rouses us from our own dogmatic slumbers, however, is Ekirch's assertion that "until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness." People, evidently, awoke after midnight and, instead of tossing and turning, they regularly got up to talk, study, pray, and do chores.

In case we're skeptical, Ekirch has found references to the "first sleep," or primo somno, and the second sleep, sometimes called "morning sleep," in literature and letters. He has dug up a medical text that advised people with digestive problems to fall asleep on their right side during "the fyrste slepe," and "after the fyrste slepe turne on the lefte side"; and he assures us that Plutarch, Livy, and Virgil all invoked the term. Indeed, Ekirch supplies enough corroboration regarding the first and second snoozes to make segmented sleep seem like one of those customs, such as bundling and dog-baiting, which simply disappeared. "That all men sleep by intervals" required no further elaboration from John Locke, who did much of his sleeping during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Two hundred or so years later, as Ekirch sees it, artificial light had become so prevalent that people's sleep patterns began to change. Those who lived in cities were now able to work, read, and play long after nightfall, and segmented sleep gradually disappeared from urban culture.

What evolved is a shorter, seamless sleep, which, on the face of it, doesn't sound that bad. But Ekirch views our truncated sleep not just as a neutral statistic of modern life but as an offense against nature. Not only do we get too little sleep; our increased exposure to luminosity has "altered circadian rhythms as old as man himself." This, rather dismayingly, turns out to have some support in the medical community. In a study conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health which re-created conditions of "prehistoric" sleep, Dr. Thomas Wehr deprived volunteers of artificial light for up to fourteen hours at night for a span of several weeks. As Ekirch notes, the "subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours of quiet rest and reflection, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening for good." In short, they began to exhibit "a pattern of broken slumber - one practically identical to that of pre-industrial households."

Wehr also observed that "the intervening period of 'non-anxious wakefulness' possessed 'an endocrinology all its own,' with visibly heightened levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for stimulating lactation in nursing mothers and for permitting chickens to brood contentedly atop eggs for long stretches of time." And because Wehr "likened this period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation," Ekirch proposes that we have lost touch with that deeper, more primal aspect of ourselves which emerges during moments after the first sleep. "By turning night into day," he writes, "modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche." If Ekirch is correct, then Thomas Edison placed entirely too much faith in his lighting device. "Put an undeveloped human being into an environment where there is artificial light," Edison predicted, "and he will improve."

But will he sleep as nature intended? It's hard to say. Most scientists are confident that internal biological timers regulate body temperature, hormone production, and sleep levels; and they're pretty sure that the suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the hypothalamus, regulates circadian oscillations. The neurobiology of the sleep-wake cycle is not in dispute, but it's one thing to know that some psychotic episodes are linked to malfunctioning biological clocks, and quite another to assert that segmented sleep is essential to some deeper understanding of who we are.

On what, then, does Ekirch rest his argument? Simply this: Because the break in sleep occurs at the end of an R.E.M. cycle (when dreaming is frequent), our ancestors were better attuned to the part of the subconscious which is responsible for dreams. And because they customarily jotted down their impressions of dreams it's clear that they took them more seriously than we do. By "they," Ekirch means the literate middle class, who supplied what evidence exists of segmented sleep. Apparently, the wealthy, who stayed up late, either enjoyed undivided sleep or failed to say otherwise. As for common laborers, they didn't know how to write, so there is scant evidence that they slept in shifts, and none to suggest that, had they awakened around midnight, they would have mulled over their dreams. It seems far more likely that a peasant, having spent ten or twelve hours in the fields clearing rocks, probably slept like one.

It should be noted that Ekirch's conclusion about the origins, if not the inadequacies, of seamless sleep was in dispute even before the publication of his book. In "Caffeine and the Coming of the Enlightenment," a brisk, informative essay that appeared in a 2003 issue of Raritan, Roger Schmidt, an English professor at Idaho State, stands Ekirch's argument on its head. According to Schmidt, it was the introduction of caffeine and coffee houses in the late seventeenth century, along with the practice of late-night reading, the development of the first accurate clocks and timepieces, and the consolidation of the Protestant ethos ("Time is money"), that worked to devalue the idea of sleep. And this, in turn, "created a demand for better nocturnal lighting." Just what we need: another chicken-or-egg argument.

...

[Randall]

Dr. Thomas Wehr deprived volunteers of artificial light for up to fourteen hours at night for a span of several weeks. As Ekirch notes, the "subjects first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours of quiet rest and reflection, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening for good." In short, they began to exhibit "a pattern of broken slumber - one practically identical to that of pre-industrial households."

"Several weeks"? Heck, I can do that in one weekend -- and with the lights on.

Now, let me know if you find anything that explains how I can get out of bed, walk across the room, hit the snooze button, and get back into bed without waking up. Several times in one day. Every day. For many, many years.

My clock has two alarms, but I think I need a few more...

Randall

[Andilinks]

My clock has two alarms, but I think I need a few more...

Place a tub of water on the floor between the bed and the alarm.

[Randall]

Place a tub of water on the floor between the bed and the alarm.

Is that supposed to wake me up, or are you just trying to electrocute me?

Well, I suppose electrocution would get my attention, for the novelty of it if nothing else.

Randall