Today I got to thinking about dreams and sleep... We sleep, depending on who you are, between 6 and 8 hours a night on average. It occurs to me what a terrible waste of time this is. If I sleep 8 hours a night then a whole third of my life is wasted on 'shut-down'.
So I got to reading. The main purpose of sleep is to dream. If we needed to physically rest we can do that without sleeping. I'm still not entirely clear on why we dream, but it has something to do with needing to reorganise thoughts and compartmentalise everything into the correct parts of our minds.
Dreams, on average, last for 7 minutes. The sleep cycle, on average, contains 7 dreams.
So... surely the only useful part of sleep could be done in 49 minutes of each night. The other 5, 6 or 7 hours are pointless. I believe the reason that different people sleep different lengths of time is that they condition their sleep cycles to speed up or slow down. If you are used to allowing yourself more sleep then you will end up needing more sleep because the gaps between dreams become further spaced apart... and vice versa. Some people can cope with 4 or 5 hours in a night.
So what I'm trying to say is, I think one day we will have figured out (and when I say 'we' I mean a bunch of scientists in white coats), how to speed up the sleep cycle to such an extent that we only need to sleep an hour every night. Just imagine the extra effective life we would gain.
Anyway, I've just realised that this is quite dull, isn't it? Just rambling..... I'll shut up now.
