Version 2
Long ago I formed a view about sleep and dreams that I don’t hear elsewhere. In my view it brings together a whole lot of understanding I have about how biology works and puts paid to much of the voodoo associated with the topic. Further, I have some attitudes to sleep that have served me well.
What is sleep
Listening to The Science Show, way back when I listened to the radio religiously, before podcasts, I heard an article about research into sleep. I have since made a half-hearted search for the actual program without success. The ABC website only has episodes back to 2018.
The researcher being interviewed explained that the research aimed to find something biological that was correlated with a lack of sleep. As hard as they searched they could only find one and it was perfectly correlated. It was protein aggregations within cells. I don’t remember the researcher giving a postulate as to why the two were so well correlated.
I am fortunate enough to have studied biochemistry as part of my science degree and a large portion of that course was devoted to the synthesis of protein. It provided truly fascinating insights into how the genetic code works and how it relates step-by-step to the construction of proteins and how they in turn provide the abilities needed for the structure, functioning and capabilities of a cell. These are fundamental and therefore important and significant processes that ARE biology. Without protein synthesis there are no cells, no reproduction, no evolution, no humanity, no thought, no consciousness, no biology.
But perhaps the most important existential realisation it provided is that nothing is directed in biology. In protein synthesis there is no mechanism that says – If we don’t have the protein that can be made from that piece of DNA over there pretty soon, we are going to run out of energy – best get to it. Instead there are proteins that run along the DNA double helix making local decisions about whether or not to create the RNA that will decode whatever protein is coded beneath it. There may be a feedback molecule that inhibits or encourages the replication but whether or not it is in place in a particular cell is open to randomness. And once the required protein is created, it doesn’t have a plan of where to go. For at least part of the journey, it gets there by diffusion. That is, by being bumped around in random directions by the fluid within the cell. Then, later when the protein is no longer required, the protein doesn’t just stop working, it gets broken down by another protein whose job it is to breakdown protein, not just the protein that is no longer needed, it breaks down all dissolved proteins. The work rate of the purposeful protein is determined by an interplay between how fast it is created and how fast it is broken down.
Imagine you are evolution and you are organising the effectiveness of the breakdown protein. Too efficient and your cell gets emptied. Too slow and the cell gets over full. Getting it just right is too fine a requirement. A likely solution is to aim to be just under the fine line. Let the protein build up slowly, but shut down synthesis every now and then and clean up.
But during the cleanup, significant parts of the operating machinery of the cell are in short supply, so the cell stops functioning. That sounds a lot like sleep. And if you stop the cleanup (ie don’t sleep) the protein builds up and clumps together – the protein aggregates. Hence the discussion on the Science Show.
So sleep is a requirement of every cell, not just a brain.
But if you are a multicellular organism, you require your cells to work together. You aren’t going to escape if a nerve cell linking the flight/fight section of the brain to the leg muscle is asleep just as you notice a predator launching into a leap. The obvious solution is that all cells in a multicellular organism must sleep at the same time. That is sleep as we know it.
Dreaming
So imagine the nerve cells in a brain that is sleeping. Let’s simplify it a little bit and say that every cell goes to sleep at the same time. In reality there is probably a sequence where cells take it in turns to sleep.
Protein synthesis stops. What do the proteins that already exist do? Until the breakdown proteins find it, they keep working – they don’t know the cell is asleep. So the nerve keeps firing and responding to other nerves firing. If the chain of nerves ends at a muscle, the muscle is going to contract. This is dangerous, because these movements are not going to be co-ordinated or directed, they will be the result of random coincidences of proteins acting before they get gobbled up.
So for sleep to work, there must be a mechanism that prevents signals from leaving the brain. It doesn’t always work, of course, which is why some people sleep walk.
But what about within the brain. What about consciousness and memory. Similarly, these need to be turned off. Or do they. Turning off memory should be enough. Being conscious of a thought, that you can’t act on and can’t remember, is not dangerous. Well, not more dangerous than being asleep. So it is quite reasonable to expect that we are conscious throughout sleep. Conscious of all the random firing of neurons within the brain. These firings will have all the higher level meanings that they do when you are awake, such as sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, emotion and thought and the state of thought and experience present in the brain before sleep will remain after sleep. However, just as the contraction of muscles would be incoherent and non-functional, the internal firings will not have a coherent story to tell because they are not ordered and consistent with the rest of the brain. We certainly don’t want to remember them because they might end up being relied upon when those memories are recalled.
These thoughts are dreams and as we expect from the story above, they contain recent senses, emotions and thoughts, but no coherence with reality. Consequently, dreams can be a great source of lateral thinking, but not of understanding of the past, present or future reality.
Attitudes
Sleep occupies one third of our time and it functions to make our bodies work well. So it is no surprise that it holds a significant place in our thoughts, and problems with it can have big consequences. The most consistent problem is not being asleep when you should, or want, to be. It helps to be good at getting to sleep. Also, we need to be able to cope when sleep appears to be avoiding us.
We have all had the experience of lying in bed, restlessly changing position and looking at the clock. Traditionally, we use aids we associate with restfulness to assist us to get to sleep.
However, what is happening in our minds when we are struggling to get to sleep? Often our minds are in overdrive, turning the same thoughts over and over, reliving some mortifying experience we wish didn’t happen or trying to resolve something that we can’t figure out. What happens to those thoughts when we listen to restful music? Nothing, they spiral on regardless.
The trick is to give your mind something else to think about. Give it something emotionally unobtrusive but fascinating. Something you can’t ignore. Something not restful.
At sleep time I lie in bed listening to a podcast on a scientific topic with the sleep timer set to 10 or 15 minutes. The timer is important, because you don’t want to have it wake you up again, later. It generally only takes a few sentences for me to get to sleep. And I am very thankful to android phones and bluetooth for that control.
But later you might wake up. The same trick won’t get you back to sleep. But it is still a good idea. This time I am thankful for a feature of my favourite podcast player – Podcast Addict. When the timer kicks in, I can shake the phone to have it continue for another 15 minutes.
So why is it a good idea? Waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep for a couple of hours is one of the worst common unwanted experiences experienced by almost all of us. Go to sleep!! I need to be alert tomorrow, I have lots to do. Oh no, not that same stupid mortification going around and around in my head – Leave me alone, GO TO SLEEP.
It’s at this point we need to realise that it is not the lack of sleep that is a problem, it is the fretting, boredom and perhaps the mortifications. If you can accept and value that time, the problem disappears. You might be short of sleep, but the body knows that and it will find ways to get enough. But the boredom and the negative thoughts we can do without. Listening to something fascinating or using your phone to write something or continue your latest project is a good way to gain that appreciation. But don’t leave your bed. When your body decides that it’s time for sleep again you don’t want to wake yourself up getting back to bed. And don’t use something that doesn’t turn itself off. Again, aren’t modern phones and bluetooth wonderful.
Which brings something a bit weird to the forefront. You can’t use two hands on a phone whilst lying down. If you try you will eventually get a really sore neck and it won’t be obvious why. Well it’s true for me, at least. The arm using the phone has to be vertical so that the muscles in your neck and arms aren’t working to keep your arm upright. And both arms can’t be vertical whilst working on the same phone. So there is a skill to learn. Being able to touch all, or most, parts of a phone screen with only one hand is a skill that doesn’t come naturally.
There is something else that we often blame for not being able to sleep. Noise. Again, traditional processes, whilst intuitively reasonable, do not work and are poorly focussed. The number one mistake is to blame the noise. It is not the noise that is keeping you awake, it is the distraction, the fear, the bitterness or the hatred we generate from hearing the noise. We know this to be true because a deaf person will not have any trouble sleeping.
With a method that does two things you can go to sleep during almost anything – fascination and no emotional response. A method I use is to enlist the noise to achieve the fascination. A fascination that does not evoke strong emotions. Imagining the sound as if it is part of a charming dream works for me. Perhaps the sound acts as wind driving a magic carpet over fascinating scenery.
Evidence
As written above, these statements form part of my belief system. But should I believe them? I live with reality, and fantasy is unlikely to serve me well if I value sleep. My stories are cogent, consistent and believable but are almost completely lacking in evidence. Do I know that my sleep health is better because of these beliefs, or would it be even better if I did not have them? Why is it that after all these years it still doesn’t form part of the communal consciousness? Am I just fascinated by their counterintuitivity? I don’t know. Perhaps, someone who actually does the research will read this and provide me with real evidence, for or against.
But there are two reasons, that I can go on believing them even without real evidence. The first is that these beliefs are unlikely to adversely affect others. If there is a global movement to accept these views, it is likely it is because people tried them and found that they respond to sleep better and have less mental health issues. I expect that we would NOT end up with a society prejudiced against those that choose not to believe them or for whom it doesn’t work because their biology is different. And I am not even trying to create a global movement until science tells me it is true.
The second is that my beliefs will not survive a reasonable argument to the contrary. The reason they are here, on this page, is to create the opportunity that I will be informed by someone who has good reason to believe that they are wrong. When that happens, you will see this page change to reflect the sensible views of others. So, please, if you know of research that draws the correlation between sleep and protein aggregates, or that measures the impact of listening to fascinating podcasts when trying to go to sleep or any of the thousands of unanswered (by me) questions, let me know in the comments below. Evidence is more important than cogency.
At the end of the day, I am hoping that the above turns out to be valuable to you, or at least interesting. And if you think it is wrong I hope that you can communicate that to me sufficiently well that I will change it.