Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

fadedrose

(10,044 posts)
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 01:44 AM Mar 2015

Nightowls who cant sleep

Put on History Channel:

http://www.history.com/schedule

No repeats tonight. New programs even mention Snowden, the Cloud, Internet, etc., and Ancient Aliens is now on History Channel in stead of H2.

The programs are being repeated since 9 pm I think, and I'm purty sure that the one coming up in about 15-20 minutes is a good one.

They're saying that April 10, 2015, will change history as we know it forever.

Make fun of me, but watching will not cost you anything but a sleepy head tomorrow if you can't tape it.....

Enjoy or not, I toldya about it, my mission is complete.....ta ta ta, ta ta, ta, that's supposed to be the them song from Scully and Mouldler....

11 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Nightowls who cant sleep (Original Post) fadedrose Mar 2015 OP
Thanks marym625 Mar 2015 #1
I've been catching up on TED talks Warpy Mar 2015 #2
Have you heard of the "2 sleeps"???? dixiegrrrrl Mar 2015 #4
I am always at my sleepiest at around 8 PM..and I wake up by 11PM SoCalDem Mar 2015 #5
This is what I do and I feel relieved that I am not strange. CTyankee Mar 2015 #6
Interesting and true fadedrose Mar 2015 #7
Yep, I was wide awake at 4 am, Central, my brain in free flow. dixiegrrrrl Mar 2015 #9
Your "disorder" was a blessing fadedrose Mar 2015 #8
Ancient Aliens... crackpots. sakabatou Mar 2015 #3
I used to think so fadedrose Mar 2015 #10
IMO, I still think AA is BS sakabatou Mar 2015 #11

Warpy

(110,744 posts)
2. I've been catching up on TED talks
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 03:20 AM
Mar 2015

and watching the videos on the "Going Clear" thread. They're good ones.

I never get to sleep before 3 and often 5, mountain time. I'm usually vertical by noon although once in a blue moon i sleep around the clock.

I've always had my days and nights mixed up from infancy on. Drugs, light boxes, and going across time zones are only very temporary fixes. I'm always back to my regular hours soon.

I don't have a sleep disorder because I worked nights, I worked nights because I have a sleep disorder.

dixiegrrrrl

(60,010 posts)
4. Have you heard of the "2 sleeps"????
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 06:18 AM
Mar 2015

Excerpt from At Day's Close: Night in Times Past


for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. This unexpected "two sleep" phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:

"Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parch­ments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in 'The Squire's Tale' wakes up in the early morning following her 'first sleep' and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the 'first sleep' on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the 'first sleep" and the 'second sleep' was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn't always the one long block that we con­sider it today.

"From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning -- the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was per­haps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French phy­sician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men 'do it better' and women 'have more enjoyment.' ...

"About three hun­dred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to four­teen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experi­ment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.

"That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.

"Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the sub­jects' brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feel­ing after an orgasm. ... The subjects in Wehr's study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.

"Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn't artificial light -- and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows -- people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. ... [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr's study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers -- not to mention your average physician -- have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong."


SoCalDem

(103,856 posts)
5. I am always at my sleepiest at around 8 PM..and I wake up by 11PM
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 06:39 AM
Mar 2015

then rarely sleep again until 6-7 AM..

CTyankee

(63,708 posts)
6. This is what I do and I feel relieved that I am not strange.
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 09:01 AM
Mar 2015

I'm in bed around 8:30-9 and up around 12-1 a.m. I have some water or milk and if wakeful I like to visit DU briefly and then go back to bed.

A sleep mask is a wonderful aid to getting extra sleep before wake up time which is usually around 6 am for me. Light coming in the windows early which happens in the late spring and summer will waken me too early otherwise.

fadedrose

(10,044 posts)
7. Interesting and true
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 09:04 AM
Mar 2015

Sometimes I wake up and think about problems that I didn't think about for ages, and figure out some solutions.....or suddenly remember somebody's birthday, or where I put that damned thingamajig. At 77 and 80, we're not the typical couple they speak of above who has the best sex ever. I'm more likely to think of what we're having for dinner and pull something out of the freezer.

But the main reason "I" have "2" sleeps is to "pee," and sometimes even "3" sleeps. That's a lotta thinking in one night. I see you posted your reply at 6:18 am my time, and that's too darned early to stay up, and you must have gone back for a 2nd sleep till about 8 am...no?

Thank you for posting Dixie, for as long as I live, when I wake up at night, I will forever think of you.

Tonight, after I turn in and fall asleep, when I wake up I will make my way to the computer and do heavy thinking. That's when I decided to post the op to this little thread.

dixiegrrrrl

(60,010 posts)
9. Yep, I was wide awake at 4 am, Central, my brain in free flow.
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 09:11 AM
Mar 2015

When I first wake up, my brain is focused and sharp and sharp and clear, excellent time for reading.
Then I go back down around 11 am, for a few hours.
Next day, usually sleep in.
Happily, I have no "have to" schedule.

So, Mr. Dixie will be up soon to take morning watch with the fur babies, and I may go back down for 2nd sleep.

fadedrose

(10,044 posts)
8. Your "disorder" was a blessing
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 09:07 AM
Mar 2015

if you waked nights, you might have fallen asleep on the job and got fired or killed....

Your sleep pattern is okay, because it's yours and it works for you. I feel for people who start work at 7 am and couldn't fall asleep until 2 or 3 am...

fadedrose

(10,044 posts)
10. I used to think so
Sat Mar 28, 2015, 09:17 AM
Mar 2015

But they have a tiny advertisement running that says they're not showing myths, that everything they show IS that old, documented by scientists, but conclusions as to the mysteries is open to conjecture. These artifacts, locations, etc., have happened in every continent on the earth, and our North America has proof of older settlements than that in the mid east where Abraham made his journey and destroyed idols, and the tablets made by Sumerians was made at least 10,000 years ago and we are to ignore them? The bible was written a mere 500 years BCE.. Most of the sacred spots all over the globe, temples, buried cities, pyramids, foundations, were built around that time, and cave drawings show similarities in places very very far apart..

NASA sent Seti a letter, didn't catch all it, because I was surprised by it, and basically they said to concentrate on Contact, and to consider archeology, geology, ancient history, etc., in determining what factors show contact. No theories based on ET contact should be discarded

Latest Discussions»General Discussion»Nightowls who cant sleep