About Sleep and Dreams

About Sleep and Dreams

I have taken sleep as a bit a routine and did not write anything scientific or substantial.

If you read the contents below it was always (with a bit of slant and satire attached) not to the point but somewhat bizzare in attitude.

Simply because sleep was not a problem for me.

I can sleep standing in a bus plying to Colombo but awake quickly enough to grab a hand of a pickpocket.

Equally, I can keep up awake with only coffee and tea in between for 48 hours.

I took a challenge and won.

I kept up 48 hours without sleeping with the challengers watching me.

Funnily enough, my watchers, could not keep up with me and they went into snooze mode while observing me.

 

Then of course, I go into sleep mode immediately after, and I won’t wake up until I had recovered fully.

The bottom line is nobody tries to wake me up (that includes my mother) while I am in sleep mode.

 

I dip into deep sleep without an intervention.

 

Nutty things to do when one is young but I won’t recommend the above to any living soul.

 

I can switch my wake and sleep cycle almost at will and I believed that others have the same ability.

 

I am proven wrong.

 

Let me expand.

 

1. I have never given a sleeping tablet to a patient for dropping to sleep except pre-medication for major surgery.

2. I am very liberal on pain relief (if one is not a drug addict).

The practice of medicine relies solely on taking grief and pain factor away from patients.

3. Sleeping tablets are lethal and one gets addicted after 48 hours.

The sleep one gets with these tablets is not normal and they upset the diurnal rhythm up to two weeks.

4. One needs minimum of 4 hours of deep sleep.

Buddha was an example who slept only 4 hours and if not occupied, he was in meditative bliss and wide awake.

5. An average adult (children needs more sleep) needs about 8 hours of sleep, not necessarily continuous (in one go).

 

One can have it in two slots which is much better, if one can afford it.

6. The bottom line is how to get the most needed 4 hours of deep sleep.

7. Many does not have the ability to roll into this mode, simply because of the inhibitions that precedes the rest or the night cap.

8. Even if one is in bed for 10 hours and not got the required 4 hours of deep sleep, he/she feels sleepy during waking hours, the next day.

 

How to avoid it?

9. Few guide lines but none might work at the beginning but with perseverance one can achieve the target of 4 hours of deep sleep unless one’s physiology is deranged or has chronic painful illnesses.

 

This advice is for one who has no other disability including major depressive illness or manic depression.

10. One should retire to bed only when days work is finished and not before. 

 

Similarly, one should have a mental sketch of what has to be done the next day (not the next week).

11. Humans work on 24 to 28 hour cycles (unfortunately little longer than the earth cycle) not less.

This is why finishing the days major chores is of paramount importance.

 

Do not leave the work for the weekends.

 

In other words “Moment Meditation” (my coining) in practice.

 

Do the things as they ought to be, at the right time.

 

No procrastination.

 

The principle here is one should not detail more work than one can accomplish in a day or day time.

 

Nothing pending at bed time.

 

If you practice this dropping to sleep is spontaneous.

 

More than likely you get to the deep sleep mode quickly.

 

It is the mental anxiety that keeps you awake the first few moments in bed.

12. When you wake up (unless you are retired and nothing else to day the next morning) in the morning do not deliberate and stay in bed for few more minutes.

 

Your sleep is interrupted by normal biological rhythm or the alarm.

 

You cannot go back to good sleep again.

 

Wake up and if you are bit early tidy up the morning work.

13. Mind you when you do not have a good sleep the first casualty is YOUR MEMORY.

 

You forget things.

14. Let me now dispense the factors that hinder your sleep.

 

Number one is excess of coffee.

No coffee at bedtime.

It is an addiction.

 

Number two is tea.

 

Both items impair your sleep and more importantly dropping to sleep is delayed.

 

Others includes heavy rice meal or alcohol.

 

Both items cause mid night hyopglycaemia and interrupt your sleep when deep sleep is about to commence.

 

In our set up rice and alcohol are culprits of breaking the sleep pattern.

 

Not only that both items cause regurgitation of stomach contents while flat on bed.

 

They cause acid irritation since starch and alcohol cannot neutralize acid secretions.

 

Light beefy (not necessarily beef but soya meat, egg omelette would do) meal and milk are the antidotes not tea or coffee. 

 

If tea is desired add lot of MILK.

 

Adding milk has no effect on coffee.

 

So take the mental and physical hindrances to your sleep as cardinal sins.

15. I have not talked about the bed, the room, the temperature, humidity and lighting (they are individual variables) BUT your cellphone is the nasty invention of modern times.

Switch it off FIRST, before any preparation (for sleep).

 

I do not have one.

16. Watching TV (passive attention) late at night (unless the next morning is an off day or holiday) is another reason for interrupted sleep and bizarre dreams.

 

Unlike natural vision digital flashes of memory of TV irritate your brain.

 

What one need is brain getting ready to relax and then sleep mode eventually.

 

It is not good for your health.

17. Computer (not cellphone) with a keyboard (you can hit the keys as they were made of steel) is a good anxiety reliever before bedtime.

 

My routine is to look at the emails and deleting the junk.

 

That routine start always after mid night.

 

Looking at your email is the most boring activity.

 

So boring YOU feel like dropping to sleep on your keyboard.

 

The advantage is that you save lot of TIME, the next morning.

 

Nobody expects (only paranoid person would take emails seriously NOW) YOU to answer emails as they come.

 

You must be liberal with DELETE action.

 

It should be like “the knee jerk reaction”.

 

This is why I prefer blogging (hate Facebook and social media) to social media.

 

Who cares if you had million hits?

 

Is it like an orgasm?

 

I doubt its impact.

18. Dreams are vital ingredients of your sleep and I will enlarge upon them with my own dreams.

 

Or you read my books on Dreams available at Amazon’s.

 

My recommendation of Sleep and Dream habits for Married Couples.

 

This applies only to married couples.

 

The young lovers should do whatever dreaming they do at lib and they should not read this article which is very obnoxious when infatuated.

 

I’ll try to be as brief as possible since married people have no time for heavy reading but reflex action only.

 

My advice to a young couple on sleep and never on dreams (since they are in a dream world which is going to end soon after the honeymoon) in good old days was one should match a couple with synchronized sleep.

 

Night sleeper who gets up early, late or indifferent.

 

Day time napper or of 8 hour 10 or 6 hour sleeper.

 

Idea was when two of them sleep which is synchronized, they get up together and the home and office work is synchronized.

 

The advantage is only to the employer and not to the married couple any way.

 

That is my new finding not disclosed.

My old advice do not stand to reality of married life.

 

One should have two erratic sleepers so that when one dreams other one is up and doing home or office chores.
 

Married life is 24/7 schedule and never 9 to 5.
 

One has to be working while the other is having a nap unlike in office life where everybody has to work whether enough work is there or not.

My recent but not published or disclosed data suggest the only time married people have a respite is in their real dream world.

So enjoy them even they are bitter to the opposite sex.

After all they are dreams.

Have you ever seen a couple who relate their dreams when woken up to the opposite spouse.

 

In my experience never.

 

The reality is that the dream is heavily edited to satisfy the opposite spouse.

Usually all the dreams are if not majority are obnoxious ones which even in reality extend from blue murder or downright slanderous.

If they truly relate these dreams the marriage won’t last even three months.

Most of the breakup are due to recurrent incidences of these obnoxious dreams.

 

One should never go to hypnotherapist for help and they (are the worse) will record them and use them to blackmail when his/her income is dwindling or volunteer to supply the information secretly to the defense lawyer of the other side for inappropriate black income.

This specially happens in Ceylon

If these dreams recur it is alright to go to a divorce lawyer but never to a hypnotherapist.

Who knows one may take undue advantage.

One has to bear them, bite the teeth and boldly take them in, one go at a time, like a true and mature married man or woman.

One should not give this information to doctors since they will give you a sleeping pill and inadvertently stop the only entertainment one has at his/her leisure time activity.

That is simply a disaster.

If you want to prolong and succeed in marriage one has to edit every dream to suit the partner and occasionally relate them saying,

 

I had a lovely dream about You KNOW with all the blah blah.

This has worked for me and I do not know about my wife.

 

All bad dreams are censored by default.

Now I write about dreams, nobody trust my dreams except Maha Brahma who never dreams in real life.

 

His hobby is to listen to my ones and interpret them with wisdom.

 

If you have any bad dream about your spouse (not your secret lover) please post them under comments.

 

I may consider sending them to Maha’s perusal and interpretation.

 

I assure you he never keeps any record of them since I am the virtual registrar.

Total Quality Management (T.Q.M) and my SLEEP

 

I have not had good sleep for the last one year or so.

There were many reasons.

Fact that, I had to published a book on “My Dreams” and their Interpretation was a good omen, not an inconvenience.

I only dream when I am down with fever or recovering form a flu episode.

I probably dream a lot but never remember them unless I am incapacitated.

Be that, as may be, for the coming year it is not a healthy pastime and this years resolution is for me to catch up all the lost sleep.

In fact, I am practicing it for the last few days and it seems to be becoming infectious in the family.

The reason for lack of sleep was my obsession of downloading 100 Linux distributions to begin with but it ended up passing over 200 and not out, which Tandurkar should be bit concerned with.

It was shear perseverance.

Lot of odds!

 

I wish Tandukar make it this year for the record.

 

Good luck it will be on your way soon.

 

Do not believe on lucky stars but believe in yourself.

My reason for keeping up in the night is that I could never get our Telecoms the speed above 5 to 10 bits in day time even though I pay for 50 bits/sec.

This is where lack of quality (Telecom) is judged by every minute of loss of my sleep.

Then there was regular electricity breaks downs.

I had to get up (before UPS shuts up) before the download stream breaks down and shutdown the computer and restart again when power is restored almost every other day due to sudden interruption to electricity supply.

That is number two in my list of lack of Quality.

Number three is the water supply.

All of the above three I pay through my nose and I have decided to terminate my Linux adventure soon.

That is after I have downloaded a few Linux gamers for demonstration.

I am trying the Ultimate gamer for the last two weeks and there is still 1 GiB left.

Hopefully without any break I would be able to download it from a point to point server.

Hope they place the image in Linux-tracker soon.

Ultimate Linux 3.0 (without games) I was able to download through Linux-tracker in 2 days.

My quality of sleep is interrupted by two or more sources.

Number one is Global Warming and its attendant increase of mosquito menace.

Number two is my dog barking at night.

Number three is the fire crackers which my dog hates.

He does not sleep and so do I.

So to solve my quality problem, I need to bring down the ambient temperature.

With coal power and the rest of the factors contributing to its upward mobility I won’t be able to solve it.

I will try my ZERO carbon out put (that means I have to die) and failing which low carbon output.

I must go into Metta Meditation and the Dream Mode to conserve energy and low CO2 output.

When I do that mosquito attraction is less.

I will encourage the misquotes to breed in my water buckets.

Then add two or three Guppy fish when full of larvae.

Water plants of course I cannot use as vegetables but I will try to find a water plant that prevent mosquito breeding.

When I sleep well my dog also sleep well.

The mosquitoes reach me first and then the dog who is under the bed.

I cannot do anything about the fire crackers.

I will put some ear plugs and possibly to my dog’s ears too.

I do not think my dog will love ear plugs.

So those are the few steps of quality control I may employ coming year.

Mind you I will stop downloading Linux within the next few weeks.

I have enough in my archives now.

One of My Typical Dreams and its interpretation from Heaven

I had two bad nights in which I kept up all night doing some bizarre routines of editing a long text file into print form, downloading, burning iso images and testing them, blogging and making PowerPoint type of presentation with Google’s Free TripWoW.

 

I had a good night sleep yesterday and woke with a nice dream.

I thought Maha Brahma would be happy since the dream was related to heaven itself.

 

I was fed up with living on this planet with so much mosquitoes and very warm weather and sleeping only a brief period at night (reason for my keeping up at night is to thrash mosquitoes and send them to heaven instantaneously with my blessings).

They are crushed with rapid alternative and reciprocal movements of my hands closing together in symphony with mosquito music beating down by ears and the mosquitoes are not spared a moment of thought (thought block) of their own (when they die) and when they wake up, really reborn, they are there in heaven with Maha, fanning the senior Devas with hand held fans (instead of beating drums like on earth).

 

The Dream

I decided to vacate my post on earth and made an early entry to heaven, with the message in a long electronic PHP form.

1 made sure, I entered every cage, like when you fill the USA Visa forms, similar to our elderly politicians who wish to be born in America instead of heaven.

They call America the heaven on earth and only the most corrupt politicians that curry favour America, including Indians organizing IPL Cricket are allowed (Not Qaddafi Type) Visa to America and reborn again, there.

In my case I made sure I did not leave any gaps fearing anybody who enter the data into the computer might add unnecessary details that might prevent my qualification for entry to heaven.

Then I saw Maha himself going through the form personally because it was recognized as my personal writing by Maha.

However, he was not happy for not leaving any room inside and between cages where he can make some entries, if he so desires and put his stamp of approval.

This was very unusual for me unlike e-forms in the web where they make it compulsory for almost all the entries to be filled so that search engines can put you in some form of commercial category to market web goods and services at lib.

I was making a big fuss why do you make it so difficult like pension claims and Maha put his hand on my shoulder and said, you are trying to be very clever aren’t you?

With the press of his hand I felt very heavy shock and woke up.

Sadly I was not in heaven in my bed.

But I had a very pleasant sense of some ease and happiness that even in my dream I was speaking to the all almighty the Maha and not to a political big wig or a Ceylonese cricket selector who is a decider cum political leader who invites a yesteryear cricketer out of his skeleton cupboard to represent at Kingston Oval having looked at his previous record book on political affiliations.

Of course one gets a ticket to London and return on Cricket Board expenses.

Maha was bit puzzled.

He thought I really wanted to join him in a hurry and deprive him some good dreams from earth.

Equally he was concerned I was pulling a fast one to get some facilitator for rear entry like our old politicians and national thinkers who are almost demented but want to secure a National List MP Post.

Did you really dream this?

Of course, I replied.

Do you know how the leave is granted in heaven?

Not a slightest bit of idea, Sir.

Then he calmed down a lot and said, this was a good dream and it is futuristic and does not apply to you.

I was relieved.

Why were you concerned about NOT leaving gaps in the e-form.

It is like this.

In heaven we grant leave to all applicants irrespective of their need.

But one has to leave a little space as a grace, offering me some administrative work space which is mandatory.

You have to mention the date of commencement only and not the date of return.

In our case what is important is the date of return.

Not the date of commencement, Sir.

We tend to fall sick for no reason, if the leave is not granted and if the date of return is not entered, then there is a bigger problem.

It is not like that in heaven since we leave the date of return cage empty, I can just put a date at random when things demand and automatically the server sends an email alert with nice music to wake up the angels on leave on the right day.

By doing this I never have the problem of everybody applying for leave at the same time.

Or I see.

Do they sleep on holidays and do you go to other heavens for vacation?

I suppose they do so, but they get easily bored when on leave and want to come back and activate their inborn desires and pastimes like listening to music, bit of gossiping about earth and it’s politics and interpreting dreams like what I am doing, now.

Did your boss real Maha leave an empty space.

No.

My goodness.

That is why I am stuck here.

I do not have a space to make an entry and call him back even if I wanted to.

So this new regulation is one of your own creations to call back whenever you need somebody.

Yes, that was why I was bit worried and thought you are trying a fast one to get to grips with administration here even before coming here.

It is like our U.G.C Chairman putting a backdated regulation for his own survival.

Can I put an entry without empty spaces.

I will let you do that since now you know my devises but do not tell other gods and angles.

OK,OK.

 

Dream Interpretation.

The interpretation is very simple because it relates mostly to Ceylon.

In future when the future presidents want some things for himself he calls the guy /girls to the president house and give them a sumptuous meal.

Then he gets you to sign some blank papers undated and make you to leave gaps in the entry form.

For example you have a Tourist Hotel which is very popular at the beach side.

He comes there for a holiday and become interested in the property.

He invites you to his house for a drink and get all the papers ready for a 10 year rolling lease period.

So that is the end of the property, I guess.

Yes, especially if the guy or girl rub shoulders at a re-election or of the ruling party.

The problem is he will do this to the entire registered population with in one year of election.

Only one census is enough and he will own the entire length and breath of the country.

How big is the country then?

The sea has advanced almost to Kandy and all the population is now in the hills and population is 100 times now.

If they do not sign what happens?.

They are loaded and sent as refugees to India by boat and India has 100,000 times more people than now and their sea has advanced almost to foothills of Himalaya.

There is no room for someone to lie down and all are standing upright and one out of thousand get a chance to lie down once a year for a holiday break for 10 to 15 minutes.

The humans have mutated a lot and have very strong legs and very long tapering hands to reach even trees (or for begging) and hang on for few minutes a day to give the legs a break and that also has to be done in turns and there is a token that handshake like a tablet (Like in Ethernet and railway) that pass around from hand to hand and one can keep it only for few minutes lest you get a teaser shock with a laser satellite in orbit.

One takes the table in one hand and reach a branch of a tree and let go the tablet before the tracer shock is given.

What about the toilets.

There is no problem, there is an automatic suction tube that sucks urine and scat separately even when one does not have the urge to go and they are used for new form of energy and water is recycled for reuse.

This is similar to the space technology developed in the shuttle.

What about the air one breaths.

One has to open an insurance policy, the moment one is born for air safety (security) and it is controlled by the Government in power and the President himself is in charge.

Process is similar to water and electricity bills but more expensive and the cleaning plants for air are connected to the same tube that suck out all excreta but with a different and safe viaduct for (breathing) air.

Free air is polluted and one cannot breath it.

I do not think you should worry about these little things you will be gone many moons before this happens.

Where to?

I am not suppose to tell you when you are still a human.

 

OK;

See you soon.

He disappeared in a flash.

Do Dogs Dream=D.D.D?

The next question is, if they do, can you detect when your dog dreams?

I am convinced that my dog dreams as well as me when on holidays.

In my case I dream on working days not on holidays.

If I dream on a holiday I consider myself sick or going to be sick.

So make sure that you do not dream on holidays; otherwise it will make the next day of YOUR holiday a misery.

In actual fact, on holidays we sleep less, do more things (as far as I am concerned) and enjoy life more.

We do not have to dream like when we are working, on holidays.

When on holidays do not dream BUT make better use of the holiday.

In any case holiday is dream come true so act on your instinct.

I have cut and pasted the probable answer/s to above but let me tell my story.

Our prolong strike (please note, I made a resolution not to write anything to amuse the readers, during the srike period) made me to observe my dog and it was a welcome change.

I was bored to death.

To begin with we synchronized our sleep.

My dreams became less and less.

I was sleeping a lot and started getting up at bizarre times when my dog was fast sleep.

Fearing I disturb his sleep, I stealthily get out of my bed and do something mundane, like sorting out my books or files or photographs.

Then I quickly lost interested in them and one day, started watching my dog who was well into its sleep.

This became a habit.

He gets into postures which were its puppy days’ habits and happy days reproductions

The dog was in complete meditative relaxation.

He does not get up at these times and enjoy them.

I am convinced he dreams well when I am on holiday without any E.E.G. records.

So if you are bored try watching your dog and try to identify the times he or she dreams.

I believe dogs need a good dose of happy dreams.

Well there is another question to wind up.

What is the single most common dream in Ceylon?

According to my survey results, every Ceylonese dreams of becoming the president of this country.

Then he gets up happy but when he realises that it was a dream he is frightened to death.

He knows only one can become the president and that is also indefinitely and he does not have a fighting chance even in a dream state.

He/She does not tell the dream even to the respective spouse.

Please do not tell this to the president.

If you do so, I am sure it will be gazetted soon “dreaming is prohibited”.

Read the article below if you have time.

Do Dogs Dream?

Dogs dream like humans and about similar things.

Published on October 28, 2010 by Stanley Coren, Ph.D., F.R.S.C. in Canine Corner

Many people believe that dogs do dream.

Most dog owners have noticed that at various times during their sleep, some dogs may quiver, make leg twitches or may even growl or snap at some sleep-created phantom, giving the impression that they are dreaming about something.

At the structural level, the brains of dogs are similar to those of humans. Also, during sleep the brain wave patterns of dogs are similar that of people, and go through the same stages of electrical activity observed in humans, all of which is consistent with the idea that dogs are dreaming.

Actually if dogs didn't dream this would be a much greater surprise given that recent evidence suggests that animals that are simpler and less intelligent than dogs seem to dream.

Matthew Wilson and Kenway Louie of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have evidence that the brains of sleeping rats are functioning in a way that irresistibly suggests dreaming.

Much of the dreaming that you do at night is associated with the activities that you engaged in that day. The same seems to be the case in rats. Thus if a rat ran a complex maze during the day he might be expected to dream about it at night. While a rat was awake and learning the maze, electrical recordings were taken from its hippocampus (an area of the brain associated with memory formation and storage).

Researchers found that some of these electrical patterns were quite specific and identifiable depending upon what the rat was doing. Later, when the rats were asleep and their brain waves indicated that they had entered the stage where humans normally dream, these same patterns of brain waves appeared. In fact the patterns were so clear and specific that the researchers were able to tell where in the maze the rat would be if it were awake, and whether it would be moving or standing still. Wilson cautiously described the results, saying, "The animal is certainly recalling memories of those events as they occurred during the awake state, and it is doing so during dream sleep and that's just what people do when they dream."

Find a Therapist

Since a dog's brain is more complex and shows the same electrical sequences, it is reasonable to assume that dogs are dreaming, as well. There is also evidence that they dream about common dog activities. This kind of research takes advantage of the fact that there is a special structure in the brain-stem (the pons) that keeps all of us from acting out our dreams. When scientists removed or inactivated the part of the brain that suppresses acting out of dreams in dogs, they observed that they began to move around, despite the fact that electrical recordings of their brains indicated that the dogs were still fast asleep. The dogs only started to move when the brain entered that stage of sleep associated with dreaming. During the course of a dream episode these dogs actually began to execute the actions that they were performing in their dreams. Thus researchers found that a dreaming pointer may immediately start searching for game and may even go on point, a sleeping Springer Spaniel may flush an imaginary bird in his dreams, while a dreaming Doberman pincher may pick a fight with a dream burglar.

It is really quite easy to determine when your dog is dreaming without resorting to brain surgery or electrical recordings. All that you have to do is to watch him from the time he starts to doze off. As the dog's sleep becomes deeper his breathing will become more regular. After a period of about 20 minutes for an average-sized dog his first dream should start. You will recognize the change because his breathing will become shallow and irregular. There may be odd muscle twitches, and you can even see the dog's eyes moving behind its closed lids if you look closely enough. The eyes are moving because the dog is actually looking at the dream images as if they were real images of the world. These eye movements are most characteristic of dreaming sleep. When human beings are awakened during this rapid eye movement or REM sleep phase, they virtually always report that they were dreaming.

I recently received a letter from Joseph Baker, which seems to confirm the idea of dogs having dreams about their everyday activities. I have taken the liberty of reproducing part of it here.

"I have an anecdote that you may find interesting, however it requires some back story. About three years ago I heard a story on the radio about a cognitive scientist who was trying to understand sleep and dreams. He had a hypothesis describing how sensory memories replay themselves during early REM sleep. The study he published had subjects play Tetris [a computer game where you try to line up falling blocks of various colors] and then report whether or not they saw the little Tetris bricks in their dreams. This stuck with me because the previous night I had very vivid dreams involving a hike I had been on earlier. I could feel the snow and smell the air as though it were real.

"This brings me to my dog. Goober is a basenji, and like many basenjis he hates water and being bathed. As soon as my wife finishes bathing him he bolts out of the bathroom door, finds me, and tries to hide behind me or under me. So one day Goober was forced to be cleaned and underwent his ritual of hiding behind me. Later that night he was sleep running. He awoke with a start, and then bolted to my location to hide under my legs. This was very awkward as I was sitting on the toilet at the time. I believe that he was dreaming, and I believe that he was dreaming about having a bath. I believe this because he only engages in this behavior when a bath is involved."

Well Joe, I believe that there are at least two psychologists at MIT who would agree with you.