Salon post: Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care...

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post. I get us started with a couple of questions, but feel free to bring up totally different things if you'd rather.

(This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.)

Topic of the week
It feels like everything I'm reading is about sleep recently - okay, and I'm most of the way through Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep which is being recommended in a lot of those conversations.

So, my question for the week is "What works for you about sleep" and I'm sort of deeply curious about what people's preferences in bedding and making bed comfy are, if there are parts of that you're willing to share.

What I've been up to
Still on "Trial of a Timelord" in the Doctor Who rewatch (I have been dipping into other things, notably QI, which is also on BritBox, which is a weird clever British quiz show. (elisem and her husband introduced me to it last year.)


House rules:
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

Just read a section on it in the last day or two - he describes a study in which is fascinating.

They took people who said they could lucid dream, and had them alternately clench their right and left hands into fists, and did scans while they were doing that to map the areas of the brain involved.

Then they let the people fall asleep in the MRI, with pre-established cues from eye movement to indicate what they were doing, since there is complete paralysis in REM sleep. (So, for example, three looks to the left when they entered lucid dreaming, two to the right when they were clenching their right hand, etc.)

And then the person in the MRI went and did things in the dream, including specific actions (moving left, moving right, repeating the hand gestures they'd mapped while awake) and the brain scans match up.

Which is definitely some interesting science. (He goes into more detail than I'm typing up here, and also has footnotes.)

I haven't done anything with lucid dreaming because I remember dreaming very irregularly unless certain med things are going on.

[florianschild]

That's fascinating, because I was very suspicious of the one or two times where I thought I might have been lucid while dreaming. There's always that wonder that maybe you're just dreaming that you're lucid and you're not really in control at all. But knowing that there has been some scientific verification makes me want to restart my practice. A good goal to work toward. :)

[rosefox]

I tried lucid dreaming once. I had a series of increasingly unpleasant dreams, all of which tried to get me to stay where I was, and I kept insisting on going down a flight of stairs (I was trying to get to a dream-space that feels safe to me, which is a basement room linked to my childhood bedroom). Finally my subconscious got tired of my attempts to stay conscious in the dream and kicked me into a non-lucid nightmare to teach me a lesson. It worked; I haven't tried lucid dreaming since.