I’ve skipped two weeks of blogging, which is unusual for me. The first time I’ll admit I was simply too tired after flying back from SQL Summit in Seattle. That, combined with catching up on work for my largest client meant I simply didn’t have time. And last week, well Monday night I was sure I was coming down with the flu and had a terrible night’s sleep and was in a brain fog all day Tuesday. Now I have no idea if it was the flu (I tend to doubt it) but by Wednesday or Thursday I was feeling a lot better.
And, then last night, I barely slept either. So suffice to say, I’ve had sleep on my brain a lot lately.
I find sleep and dreaming to be fascinating aspects of evolution. When you stop to think about it, unless you’re an apex predator, sleeping would appear to be an evolutionary poor choice in many cases. Depending on the animal, it can spend anywhere from 2-3 hours asleep (perhaps broken up over the course of the day) to 20 hours.
And in fact, predators often tend to sleep more, which conserves energy, while prey tend to sleep less (so they can more easily flee said predators).
Some animals in fact are capable of unihemispheric sleep, i.e. only half of their brain appears to go to sleep. In fact dolphins in pods appear to sleep such that if they’re on the outside of the pod, the side of the brain that goes to sleep is opposite of the eye on the outside of the pod. They literally sleep with “one eye open” looking for danger.
Yet, despite the risks to prey, they still sleep. It seems pretty universal and something that as far as I know, all vertebrates do to some point. So it seems pretty necessary. And we’re learning at least in humans that chronic lack of sleep can lead to issues such as dementia later in life or even a shortened lifespan. It seems the phrase, “you can sleep when you’re dead” tends to mean that your death may come even sooner if you chronically undersleep.
And when we sleep, we don’t just basically stop interacting with the outside world, we create a fantasy world inside our heads. I’m a person who can often remember his dreams and they tend to be vivid and rich in detail. When dreams incorporate elements of places I’ve been or seen I’m not surprised. But then occasionally I will dream of places I know I’ve never been, houses I’ve never been in, landscapes I’ve never seen in such detail. It amazes me that my brain can, to use a computer term, render such rich detail in what appears to be real time.
In any event, right now, sleep is on my brain, but work calls.
greenmountainsoftware 