Sleep - The Beginning

Sleep has always fascinated me.

For 6 - 8 hours out of every 24, my body needs to go into come kind of a stand-by mode. I can by force of will or chemical enhancement delay or reduce the sleep need but sooner or later my body will ctrl-alt-delete. Usually at an inconvient time and place. Like in a meeting. Or on the subway.

But think about it. Imagine you had a phone, computer, car, or even an insignificant little ball point pen that needed 8 hours of maintenance out of every 24. It would be an outrage! How many days would it take for you to boil over, and fire that piece of junk in the trash? How many times having to say - " Sorry I really wanted to return your call but the phone was on stand-by for the entire evening" would it take for you to go absolutely nuts? And maybe that attitude is exactly why we don't sleep as much as we need. My body should be the same as my Blackberry - recharge it for 2 hours every third day. Right?

Of course! Why else would 146 Billion cups of coffee be consumed in America alone in 2008. Yes 146,000,000,000 http://www.coffee-statistics.com/coffee_statistics_ebook.html. Why else would 5 Hour Energy sell 3.4 million 5 ounce shots of caffeine and uber B vitamins a week? Why else did Red Bull sell over 3 billion cans in 2006 alone. Deep down we know that the 8 hours of shutdown is wrong and we fight it.

One of my university professors called sleep something you do in your spare time.

So welcome to my blog. In it I'll ramble on about my continuing fascination with sleep and will likely mention other things I do in the rest of my "spare time". I plan to make you think, to have you pause and say "huh - I never thought about it that way before" or at least confirm that I'm more of a nut case than you already suspected.

The journey begins. Welcome aboard. Try not to dose off.