I woke up this morning thinking about sleep – mostly how little we know about it.  We spend nearly a third of our lives in it while we’re here on the planet and yet we think about it little.  It’s just something we do.

I’m not at all an expert on the subject.  But I do have nearly 20 years of experience.  Trouble is, while I’ve been experiencing it, I’ve been asleep.
:o)

I know one thing for sure: I don’t get enough of it.  Also, for the last 10 years my sleep patterns have really changed.  I used to get my 8 straight as a boy, then as a young man I moved to 6 a night.  I seemed to do just fine with that, but if I got even 5 on one night, then I’d have to get in a couple of 8 straight to get on top of it.  Otherwise I’d just be wasted for days.

Then, in my latter years, my sleep patterns changed again.  I think it was when my son was born and I used to take the middle of the night feeding so that my wife could sleep.  Waking up around 3 or 4 was excruciating for me.  I was a 6 straight guy and I would crawl out of bed when the baby would cry and stagger around like a drunk.

After the feedings stopped, I kept waking up anyway and laying there trying to go back to sleep.  I began, at those times, to suffer from insomnia.  It was not fun.  No matter what I did, I could not go back to sleep.  I tried everything.

And then one day I solved it.  I got up.  I’ve been doing so for 10-12 years now and I just love it.  As soon as I wake up, I get up.  I don’t lie around and try to go back to sleep.  I get up and go.

I usually get to bed around midnight, sleep for 4-5 hours and then get up.  This gets me up at around 4 or 5 in the morning.  The house is quiet, the phone don’t ring, the city sleeps.  It’s my time and mine alone.  I used to make a cup of hot chocolate, read for an hour and then go back to bed and immediately back to sleep.  I enjoyed the reading and the time so much that I began to stay up 2 hours.  It was a great time to write lyrics, get organized, think deeply, pray, meditate.  Then I began to write my blog.

Now I get up every night for 3 hours and write.  It’s my favorite time of day.  I go back to sleep then and usually complete my 7 hours.  I love the schedule and flourish in it.  These hours between 4-7 are precious to me and I’m excited every morning when I wake up around 4.  I have absolutely no ill effects from getting this kind of ‘broken’ sleep.  I just make sure that when I get up, I do something positive.

I’ve always been blessed with the ability to go immediately asleep at night – usually within a minute or two at the most.  However, within the first 15 minutes of that sleep, if something wakes me up, it’s nearly impossible for me to go right back to sleep.  It’s as if the 10 or 15 minutes that I got was enough and then I’m wide-awake.

I don’t like to nap during the day.  If I do, I’ve learned to do this:  I lie down on the rug (not the bed) on my back.  I place the elbow of my right arm on my chest extending my forearm and hand vertically toward the ceiling.  I then shut my eyes and let myself fall asleep holding my arm extending up from my body.  When I do fall asleep, my arm naturally falls and my hand whacks me gently.  It always wakes me up.

That’s all I need and so then I get up and move on with life.  I’ve been told that I go, in those moments, to my sub-conscious Alpha level and that the visit there just for the few seconds is all I need to relax and get what I need from my 3 minute nap.  It works.

Digression:  The whole purpose of my blog is to get us all thinking about Inspirational things.  I’m not suggestion that you do what I do.  That’s up to you.  I’m just suggesting that you think about it.  If you read this blog on a daily or even ‘sometimes’ level, then you’re clearly interested in some of the things that I’m interested in.  I do this just to get us all thinkin’.

The Russians did a lot of sleep research in the 50s.  I used to keep up with it.  They did experiments with people allowing them only 2 hours a night.  Though some very interesting details came out of this, most of the people went crazy.

Also they did experiments with people dreaming.  When the subjects would start to dream, and the scientists could tell from their REM (rapid eye movements), they would immediately wake them up and not allow them to dream.  All of these unfortunates went crazy as well.

How brave we are to go to sleep.  We crawl into this funny place called bed, turn the lights out so that it’s very dark, close our eyes and shut out any light leftovers and let our lives slip down into this black hole of unconsciousness.  We make a conscious decision to give up consciousness.  We allow ourselves to retreat from the consciousness of this experience into the nothingness of a whole other experience that we know nothing about.  We trust that in the morning we will wake up – and we do.

And yet we’re afraid of death.

There seems to me to be a great similarity at this moment.  The only difference is that with sleep, we are practiced.  We learn in childhood that it’s all right.  In fact, Mom sings to us as we do so.

Perhaps on my own deathbed I shall hire a group of my favorite singers to sit around the bed and sing me out.  Not a bad idea at all.  Perhaps we’re getting a little morbid for you, but the whole idea of a lullaby for the passing is a concept that I could really get into.  What a way to go.  I lived with music.  Why not transition with it?

But I digress for the second time.  Over the next 4 nights we will explore dreams, dream study and finally astral projection – all fascinating junkets started in sleep.

Sleep:  To rest and restore.  To trade consciousness for unconsciousness.  To trust your life to the unknown.

We move from unconsciousness to sub-consciousness to consciousness and hopefully to higher consciousness in this earthly experience.  I believe the goal should be spiritual consciousness.  We’re allowed, in this earthly experience, to move fairly freely from one to another.  I don’t know about you, but I sure would like to understand it all a little better.

Once again, I invite your thoughts.