We all do it, some of us do it more than others, and most of us cherish it.
During those heavenly hours when we go into sleep mode, some weird and wonderful things
happen to us…Sleep is the final frontier, a place where dreams burst into life, but
also a place where strange and sometimes dangerous things happen.
As you’ll find out today, there’s a lot more to sleeping than you think, and it’s
only really in the last few decades that we’ve begun to understand the importance of having
a good slumber.
Without further ado, welcome to the sleep zone.
50.
If you go without sleep it’s called sleep deprivation, and you can start to feel cranky
and anxious if you go just 24 hours without a doze.
Go 48 hours, and you will become very fatigued.
At this point you might have something called “micro-sleeps”, which means dropping off
without even knowing it for just a second or two.
Go 72 hours, and it’s likely you have difficulty concentrating and might start to get paranoid
– ask any methamphetamine fiend what happens to them after a few days insufflating crystals.
After the three day mark, there’s a chance you might suffer from bouts of psychosis.
49.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in three Americans don’t
get enough sleep.
Scientists believe most humans need at least seven hours of sleep, but many people don’t
get nearly that much.
48.
In 1987, a man named Kenneth Parks got in his car and drove around 12 miles (20km) to
his mother in law’s house.
He then entered the house and bludgeoned his mother in law to death with a tire iron.
After that, he tried to strangle his father in law, but he didn’t succeed in killing
him.
Covered in blood, Parks drove to the police station and told the cops that he may have
just killed two people.
He didn’t go to prison for his crime, since it was believed he had committed the act while
sleepwalking.
47.
In 2005, a 15-year old girl in England went for a walk while she was sleepwalking.
She actually managed to climb up a 130-foot (40 meters) crane.
There she remained, until a firefighter climbed up the crane and rescued her.
The girl was still sleeping when he got to her.
Of course she was very confused, having gone to sleep in her bed and woken up at the top
of a crane.
Just imagine if that happened to you.
46.
Lots of studies have been done so we can better understand dreams.
One strange thing about dreams is the fact that something like 12 percent of people report
they only dream in black and white.
Why?
We don’t exactly know.
We know that a lot more Americans in the past dreamed in black and white.
The main reason for that is that TV was black and white.
45.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, only one in four married couples in the USA
actually share the same bed.
The separation isn’t always because the couple has fallen out of love or they argue
too much, it’s more likely to be because they disturb each other’s sleep patterns.
44.
Some people just can’t seem to get out of bed in the morning.
Some struggle, but others really feel like they just can’t make the move.
There is a term for this and it’s called “Dysania.”
There are a number of reasons that this can happen, and it could simply be that the person
is not getting enough quality sleep.
It might also be related to anxiety or depression.
It’s not a medical condition per se, but some people can have chronic dysania and some
sufferers have been known to stay in bed for days on end.
43.
Some people are born blind, so you might wonder what they dream about since they have not
visualised the world.
Well, blind people’s dreams tend to be more about the other senses, such as taste and
smell and sounds, but there is evidence that some blind people can have visual dreams,
too.
Studies have also found that people who were born blind tend to have more nightmares than
people who can see.
These might be related to the sense of falling or getting lost.
42.
Some people claim to never dream at all, but that’s just because they rarely if ever
wake up during their REM portion of sleep.
This is when the brain is most actively dreaming, and self-professed non-dreamres who were woken
up during REM sleep admitted they had been dreaming.
41.
Do dogs dream?
It seems they do, since scientists have looked at dogs’ brains’ electrical activity while
they were sleeping.
Some of those scientists said that the average sized dog will start to dream after about
20 minutes of sleep.
At this point you should be able to see the rapid eye movements of the dog.
Ok, so you might now ask, do dogs sleepwalk, too?
The answer it seems is no, although they might flop about a bit while they’re sleeping.
It’s unlikely that one day you’ll find your dog at the top of a crane, fast asleep.
40.
We don’t know where the myth originated, but some people hold the belief that if they
were to die in their dream they’d die in real life.
Simply put, this is hogwash.
Many people have reported dying in a dream and they lived to tell the tale.
39.
Humans are the only animal that deliberately delays their sleep.
38.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, the body does not adjust to shift work.
On its own website, the organization says that people who work shifts and change their
sleep pattern a lot are more likely to later develop diseases, such as cardiovascular and
gastrointestinal diseases.
37.
Around 90 million Americans snore, and 37 million of those folks do it on a regular
basis.
36.
Some people claim they don’t sleep much at all, and some of them are pretty well known.
Donald Trump wrote in his book, “Think Like a Billionaire” … “Don’t sleep any
more than you have to.
I usually sleep about four hours per night.”
Well, at least he paid someone to write that in a book for him.
Other reports state he sleeps about 6 hours a night, which would be the same as Elon Musk.
In fact, we found lots of reports stating that many CEOs and famous people only sleep
between four and six hours a night.
Now let’s get strange again…the best is yet come.
35.
There is a guy in the UK by the name of Lee Hadwin.
He’s been painting in his sleep since he was four and as an adult he carried on doing
it.
He’s been dubbed the sleepwalking artist and has made a lot of cash from selling his
artworks.
He goes to bed, and when he wakes up there’s sometimes a drawing or painting in front of
him.
He said when he was 15 years old he woke up and found that he’d drawn a really good
picture of Marilyn Monroe.
The thing was, in his waking life he had no talent whatsoever for drawing.
Some of his paintings have been sold for six figures, and even Donald Trump has bought
one of them.
He’s made a lot of cash and kind of put no effort into it.
Hadwin’s skills have baffled scientists, and no one really knows how he manages to
create his works while asleep.
Some people have said he’s a fraud, although experts at the Edinburgh Sleep Clinic have
witnessed him sleep-working and they say he’s the real deal.
34.
Most people tend to fall asleep after around 7 to 15 minutes of trying, although anyone
who has suffered from insomnia or stress will tell you that it might take them hours to
find slumberland.
33.
On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who falls asleep as soon as your head
hits the pillow, it’s likely you are sleep deprived.
32.
You can find recent articles in the media that tell you that around nine million people
in the U.S. take a sleep medication, although the data cited is CDC research that is now
a decade old.
Still, we found more stories talking about Americans’ problem of falling asleep.
It does indeed seem that millions of adults are taking a medication for sleep, or medications
to reduce stress and anxiety.
The downside to this are some side-effects and also dependency on the drug.
With some medications there is something called a rebound effect, so if the person tries to
quit they might experience even worse anxiety, stress, or insomnia.
31.
The younger you are, the more you sleep.
Babies usually sleep 14 to 17 hours a day and they usually don’t have a problem dozing
off.
14 to 17 year olds usually sleep anywhere from 7 to 11 hours a day.
According to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, it’s important that younger folks
get this extra sleep, compared to adults who can get by on 7 hours.
Parents shouldn’t nag if their teenager likes to spend, say, 10 hours asleep.
Still, according to the CDC, two thirds of high school students aren’t getting enough
sleep, especially on school nights.
30.
Twenty percent of American adults hit the booze before bedtime, and if you’ve ever
done that, you’ll know that it can help you to fall asleep.
But is it good for you…in the sense of sleep, not what it does to your organs.
The experts tell us that a drunk sleep might not be the best sleep because the alcohol
can prevent you from having those good REM sleeps.
You might also wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep
again.
A bucket of beer might also lead to many trips to the bathroom throughout the night, and
as some of you know, drunk sleepers tend to snore.
That’s because the booze has relaxed their throat muscles, and also because drunk sleepers
tend to sleep on their backs.
29.
New research has shown that more people are now texting in their sleep, especially people
who have grown up with a mobile phone.
This is a very modern “parasomnia”, which means sleep disorder.
Still, it’s a good excuse if you’ve texted something you regret in the morning.
If your partner finds out that you’ve texted an old flame, you now know what to say, “My
love, it was merely a sleep-text....Totally out of my control.”
Now for something really wacky.
28.
We imagine that just a few of you guys watching this video have woken up in the middle of
the night with a raging hunger.
You’ve gone down to the kitchen, raided the fridge, and left a trail of destruction
behind you.
But how many of you have done this while still sleeping?
You might have experienced something called “Nocturnal Eating Syndrome”, but as a
sleep-related eating disorder.
It’s full name is “Nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder.”
People who have suffered from this have sometimes raided the kitchen several times in just one
night, but they didn’t remember a thing the next day.
It sounds funny, but NES can be dangerous as eating while still asleep could lead to
choking or having an accident.
In extreme cases, people have been known to put on lots of weight, while some people have
fired up the stove and made a complex meal.
Others have eaten things such as salt sandwiches, raw meats, frozen food, and would you believe
it, buttered cigarettes.
Yikes.
27.
Arguably better than that is something called “Exploding Head Syndrome.”
These people might be on the cusp of sleep when suddenly they hear a loud explosion,
or hear the sound bullets or great claps of thunder.
It freaks them out to say the last, especially if the noise is accompanied by flashes of
light.
The good news is that it’s not dangerous.
No one really knows why it happens.
It might be related to problems with the ear, nerve dysfunction, a minor seizure, or just
your regular stress.
26.
Driving while feeling drowsy can lead to accidents, with the CDC saying in the US alone in recent
years thousands of fatal crashes happened because someone nodded off behind the wheel
or was very close to it.
The statistics differ depending on what you source you are reading, but everyone agrees
that driving while very fatigued is a bad idea.
In one poll, 37 percent of people admitted that they had fallen asleep while driving
at least once in their life.
25.
Is napping good for you?
NASA wanted to know this because it wanted to see if napping improved the performance
of its pilots.
The agency concluded that the ideal nap should last 26 minutes.
This can improve alertness and reduce stress.
With this in mind, if you ever find yourself in a position where you have to drive a long
distance, or you have to do something that’s very important, if you feel tired you should
find a suitable place to take a nap.
This might improve your performance and keep you concentrated.
24.
According to some studies, it’s a myth that you can catch up on sleep.
Some people might think, hmm, if I sleep only a few hours on Monday and Tuesday, I will
catch up those missing hours later in the week.
Harvard Medical School said this is not the case.
Its study revealed that people who often have nights of little sleep will always suffer
in the end.
23.
Exercise helps you fall asleep easier and also helps you to sleep better throughout
the night.
Why, though, you might ask.
Well, scientists tell us that exercise releases endorphins in our brains and this can reduce
stress and depression.
In fact, studies have shown that when people suffering from insomnia did four months of
exercise they slept better and were less anxious in general.
The thing was, though, the good sleep didn’t come immediately.
Participants had to put some effort in.
22.
Almost half of Americans sleep rolled up in the fetal position, so it seems we have a
fondness for how we kicked it back in our mother’s womb.
Back sleeping is the second most common and after that stomach sleeping.
Then there are people that combine different sleeping positions.
Some research tells us that sleeping on your back is the best position to promote good
health, although it might depend on if you have certain health issues.
21.
We generally dream 4 to 6 times throughout the night, and as you’ll soon find out,
this can be a problem.
20.
Some of you will know that one of the scariest things that can happen to you during sleep
is dreaming that you are awake.
Such a “false awakening” might mean you get up, go downstairs, have a drink of orange
juice and then suddenly you realize something isn’t right.
You then might wake up for real, often with your heart pounding.
Even worse is the fact that some people have woken up with a shock and then seen someone
standing over them.
This is a dream within a dream again, and then the person might wake up for real.
These are called multiple false awakenings, which has been described as a Russian doll
of dreaming.
That’s scary.
19.
Some people can dream and while they don’t wake up they are aware they are dreaming.
These are called lucid dreams.
You might even be able to give yourself superpowers in these dreams, such as the guy who says
when he is being chased in a nightmare sometimes he just has to decide to run backwards and
he shoots off like a rocket.
Why do we lucid dream?
It’s likely because a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
is partly switched on during sleep when it usually isn’t.
This part of the brain deals with planning, reasoning, working memory and thinking about
multiple concepts.
In a lucid dream, the person then becomes conscious enough to know they are dreaming,
but not conscious enough that they wake up.
That’s one theory, anyway.
18.
So, which country’s citizens get the best sleep?
We found some data and it seems that folks from New Zealand on average sleep the most
hours.
The Netherlands, Finland, Britain and Australia weren’t far behind and the U.S. was somewhere
in the middle.
The worst sleeping nation was Japan, followed by South Korea and then Saudi Arabia.
17.
According to the National Sleep Foundation only eight percent of Americans sleep totally
naked, while a whopping one third of British folks sleep in the buff.
16.
There is no proof that eating cheese can give you nightmares, but if you go to bed on a
full stomach it might affect your sleeping pattern.
It can make you restless as your body digests the food, and therefore you might wake up
more during REM sleep.
15.
Around 1.4 percent of people sleep with their eyes open, a condition known as nocturnal
lagophthalmos.
It simply means they cannot close their eyelids during sleep, with some folks sleeping with
their eyes fully open and others just partially open.
They have no idea they’re doing it since they’re asleep, but it looks pretty freaky
to other people.
There are other reasons why someone might sleep with their eyes open, relating mostly
to disease, trauma and autoimmune conditions.
14.
In 2010, a man named Gregory Machon said he was kicked off a US Airways flight because
he was caught sleeping with his eyes open.
He’d fallen asleep before the plane had even taken off, but when one of the cabin
crew saw him sleeping with his eyes open, she thought he was ill and asked if anyone
on board could help.
There was actually a nurse on the plane, but she had no idea why someone would sleep with
their eyes open.
She had not heard of nocturnal lagophthalmos, and while Machon explained that he often slept
this way, in the end the crew decided he wasn’t fit to fly.
He wasn’t very happy about this at all.
Ok, coming up to the top thirteen.
Now we have some really strange things to tell you.
13.
You cannot sneeze when you are sleeping.
12.
Studies have shown that people have a worse night’s sleep when there is a full moon.
Why that happens is confusing, but the obvious answer might be because of the light of the
moon.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, though, because when scientists in Switzerland watched
people as they slept during a full moon, the subjects were literally kept in the dark.
They were figuratively kept in the dark, too, since they had no idea what the experiment
was about.
The scientists found that when the moon was full, on average the people spent 30 percent
less time in deep sleep and slept less time overall.
It also took them longer to fall asleep.
Some scientists believe that humans are naturally attuned to the moon’s cycle, and that’s
why its fullness affects our sleep.
More studies have been undertaken, with mixed results.
One study showed kids slept longer during a full moon, but another revealed again that
adults slept less.
11.
Back when the British were leading the Industrial Revolution a new job came onto the scene so
that the people got to the factories on time.
This job was called a knocker-upper.
For a few pennies a week, some guy would come around to workers’ houses and knock on their
doors, or windows, or use a pea-shooter to hit the higher level widows.
In the 19th century the author Charles Dickens wrote about this occupation, but knocker uppers
were still around in the 1970s.
The first personal alarm clock was invented in 1787, but we guess not everyone in Britain’s
industrial cities had one.
10.
Things can turn ugly if you wake someone up who is experiencing something called sleep
terrors, or night terrors.
These are very intense nightmares.
Fortunately, only around one percent of adults suffer from regular night terrors, and while
someone might thrash around a bit or scream out, the person next to them will usually
not be harmed.
That’s not always the case, though, and we found instances when people had attacked
their partner during a night terror.
During the frenzy, the dreamer might also hurt themselves.
This is how one woman described how her husband would sometimes act during sleep:
“He seems to have the strength of 10 men and shoots straight up from bed onto his feet
in one motion.
He’s landed clear across the room on many occasions and has pulled down curtains, upset
lamps, and so forth.
He’s grabbed me and pulled on me, hurting my arms.”
There are many reasons why someone might have night terrors, from substance abuse to childhood
trauma to PTSD, to a family history of parasomnia.
9.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, you should wash that pillow of yours at least
once every six months and you should replace it after a year or two.
The reason is dust mites.
These little fellas can impair breathing and worsen allergies.
8.
Babies are another thing that really get in the way of a good night’s sleep.
It’s reported that a new person in the house will result in 400-750 hours of lost sleep
for parents.
7.
Major global events can make many people have a bad night’s sleep.
A big event might have this effect for many months, as many people have experienced during
the coronavirus pandemic.
Other major sleep disturbers have been the 9/11, the Challenger space shuttle disaster
and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
While it’s good to know about current events, we can certainly consume too much news.
Sometimes you have to tune out and just be in the moment.
6.
When your stress levels are high the hormone corticosteroid can negatively impact the effectiveness
of the immune system.
A vicious cycle that can happen is a person is stressed and so sleeps less, and then the
next day the lack of sleep means they deal with stress worse.
They might then sit in front of the TV watching news media that sounds apocalyptic.
This creates stress, which creates sleeplessness, in a repeating cyclical pattern.
5.
Some people dread going to bed and falling asleep, a condition called Somniphobia.
One sufferer in the UK explained it like this: “I would stay up listening to my mum’s
snoring just to make sure she was alive.
I was petrified that if I slept, something bad might happen, and I wouldn’t be awake
to help.”
Some of these people might fear the loss of control they have during sleep, or they might
worry about what could happen while they are unconscious.
Some sufferers have said the fear comes from having had night terrors or bouts of sleepwalking,
while for others a traumatic event in the past caused the dread of the bed.
Ok, we’re getting to the end now…but there’s still so much more to tell you about sleep.
4.
5 to 7 million kids in the U.S. wet the bed, although by the time kids reach the age of
ten only about 2 to 3 percent of them wet the bed.
One study we found said that one in 50 teenagers in the U.S. wets the bed.
Ok, so why do some folks wet the bed In the first place?
It could be a number of things, such as the child having a smaller than average bladder
or the fact both his parents were bedwetters.
It might also be because they have lower than average levels of the hormone vasopressin,
or simply the fact their sleep is just too deep.
Stress and infections can also be a reason.
3.
According to the experts, counting sheep as a strategy to fall asleep is useless.
2.
Some studies have shown that if you regularly sleep well you might deal with pain better.
In those studies, the scientists allowed participants to sleep a certain number of hours.
When they were later tested to see how they dealt with pain, the people who had slept
more seemed to feel less, so much so it was as if they had taken codeine.
1.
Lastly, we’ll tell you about the horror of something called “fatal insomnia”.
This is a rare disease, thank God, which affects the brain.
It happens because of a tiny genetic mutation in the brain, but that mutation in time will
mean the sufferer will find it very hard to sleep.
The insomnia will get worse and worse and this will lead to hallucinations, delirium
and finally death.
It might take many years for the person to show any symptoms, but once they do there
is no going back.
Over a period of months the person will suffer from panic attacks, which will lead to paranoia,
and then the hallucinations will occur.
Next will come weight loss and finally when the patient hasn’t slept for a long time,
they will become unresponsive.
It could happen when the person is as young 18 or it might not happen until they’re
in their 60s.
There’s no cure for this nasty disease, and even the strongest sleeping pills or other
sedatives don’t seem to help.
It’s just one long, agonizing nightmare, so we can be glad that only around 40 families
have been known to carry this gene.
Now you really need to watch, “50 Surprising Facts About Space You Didn't Know”.
Or “50 Insane Facts About Titanic You Didn't Know.”