Sleep-wise, I've had an abysmal week. I suffer from a kind of insomnia known as early morning wakefulness, which means that I have no trouble getting to sleep, but staying asleep is a real problem. For the past six months or more, I've been waking up in the mornings at 4:00 or 4:30, unable to return to sleep (this is a cycle I've had periodically for more than 20 years).
However, this week my wake-up time has inched its way into the unreasonable zone. First I was waking up at 3:30, and then 3:00, then 2:30, and the night before last I was up at 1:30, just 2 1/2 hours after I'd gone to bed. Up and awake and alert, with no chance of going back to sleep.
Today I listened to a podcast on sleep disorders, hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences' podcast Science & the City. The opening segment was with journalist David Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, who was inspired to delve into this topic because of his own sleepwalking issues. Randall discussed how the invention of the lightbulb has divorced modern sleep patterns from the cycle of the sun, by which our brains and sleep cycle are naturally regulated, as shown by experiments in which subjects are sequestered in an environment lighted to copy the sun's cycle. In those cases, sujects fall asleep just after sundown and wake up around daybreak.
However, there's one more behavior these subjects exhibit that I didn't anticipate. They tend to wake up around midnight or one in the morning, and stay awake for about an hour before returning to bed. (The natural phenomenon of this "first and second sleep" are documented in the Canterbury Tales and in 16th century French physicians' manuals.) During this awake time, subjects reported feeling quite good and indulging in "me" time. Researcher who drew their blood found the subjects' exhibited heightened levels of pro-lactin, a hormone which is linked to a feeling of contentment.
This was news to me...instead of feeling robbed of my sleep and desperate to return to it, I will now try to think of my middle-of-the-night awake time as an indulgence of free time for myself, a biologically-programmed way for me to get the downtime I am definitely not getting during the day (and perhaps that is why my body/mind keeps waking me in the night, for forced downtime?).
Coincidentally, today I also read an article on the Writer's Digest website, entitled "Do You Dream In Paragraphs? Mine Your Dreams For Writing Ideas," about ways to get creative ideas from your dreams. I've written about this in the past on this blog, so I won't cover that territory today, but if you are interested, check out the article at Writer's Digest. As for me, I haven't fixed any poetry dilemmas in my wakefulness this past week, but I was able to solve a problem I've been having with an analytical task for my linguistics course. That liminal time between awake and asleep (which I've doubled with my first and second sleeps now!) is a boon to the mind's flexibility--I'll remember that too when I undoubtedly wake in the middle of the night tonight!
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Friday, April 26, 2013
Monday, February 7, 2011
Leaping While Sleeping
When I was a graduate student, I would sometimes be assigned a difficult mathematical proof to present to the class. There was one that I had worked on for days, but the night before the presentation I was still stuck at a crucial step. I had a copy of the finished proof (I'd been given the paper expositing it, and was to explain it to the class in lieu of their having to slog through it), and if I skipped over that one step, I could explain everything after it, as well as before it. But that one step eluded me, and the paper offered no explanation for a highly convoluted line of mathematical symbols which seemed unrelated to anything that came previously.
At 3 am, I gave up and went to bed, slightly horrified, because as the only woman in the entire graduate program, I particularly hated to fail in front of my peers. When I awoke in the morning, I knew the answer. I just woke up with it in my head. It was a brilliant piece of symbolic manipulation necessary to force the proof to its end. Later, when presenting the proof to the class, I impressed even the professor who admitted that he also had not been able to figure out that particular leap between lines.
This has happened to me several times with regards to proofs or math problems, and a few more times when I was working as a financial analyst. My subconscious mind (or perhaps my unconscious mind--I asked a psychiatrist friend once what the difference was and he replied, Well, that's the million-dollar question) can solve things that my conscious mind cannot.
Do poets have this ability to access the not-conscious mind too? Apparently they do. In an interview with the UK Guardian in December of 2006, the poet Anne Carson (my hero) said, "I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time. But the jumps between them are entirely at that moment."
I suspect that many poets can access those jumps, have those moments, when they are awake. I, however, cannot, at least not yet. I suffer from the overly rational mind as described by Sir Rabindranath "Tagore" Thakur: "A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
So I have learned to access my not-conscious mind, which is so much more resourceful than my conscious mind, in sleep. However, I cannot force it. It doesn't work unless I have exhausted every possible avenue my conscious mind can attempt in my waking hours. And even then, it doesn't always work. When insight like that comes, it's a gift.
Dreams are a well-known source of creativity. Many scientific discoveries were first seen in dreams: the helical structure of DNA was first seen by James Watson in a dream, for example. I know poets also commonly use the imagery of their dreams in their work. But what I want to know is this: all you poets out there, can you access your not-conscious mind in the waking state? Can you make those genuinely astounding intuitive leaps without resorting to sleep? And if so, how? And by how, I mean not only how does it happen, but also how do you stimulate that kind of access organically? What rituals do you have, if any, that lead to these kinds of soaring leaps in your thinking? Seriously, I'd like answers to this, if you've got them.
At 3 am, I gave up and went to bed, slightly horrified, because as the only woman in the entire graduate program, I particularly hated to fail in front of my peers. When I awoke in the morning, I knew the answer. I just woke up with it in my head. It was a brilliant piece of symbolic manipulation necessary to force the proof to its end. Later, when presenting the proof to the class, I impressed even the professor who admitted that he also had not been able to figure out that particular leap between lines.
This has happened to me several times with regards to proofs or math problems, and a few more times when I was working as a financial analyst. My subconscious mind (or perhaps my unconscious mind--I asked a psychiatrist friend once what the difference was and he replied, Well, that's the million-dollar question) can solve things that my conscious mind cannot.
Do poets have this ability to access the not-conscious mind too? Apparently they do. In an interview with the UK Guardian in December of 2006, the poet Anne Carson (my hero) said, "I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time. But the jumps between them are entirely at that moment."
I suspect that many poets can access those jumps, have those moments, when they are awake. I, however, cannot, at least not yet. I suffer from the overly rational mind as described by Sir Rabindranath "Tagore" Thakur: "A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
So I have learned to access my not-conscious mind, which is so much more resourceful than my conscious mind, in sleep. However, I cannot force it. It doesn't work unless I have exhausted every possible avenue my conscious mind can attempt in my waking hours. And even then, it doesn't always work. When insight like that comes, it's a gift.
Dreams are a well-known source of creativity. Many scientific discoveries were first seen in dreams: the helical structure of DNA was first seen by James Watson in a dream, for example. I know poets also commonly use the imagery of their dreams in their work. But what I want to know is this: all you poets out there, can you access your not-conscious mind in the waking state? Can you make those genuinely astounding intuitive leaps without resorting to sleep? And if so, how? And by how, I mean not only how does it happen, but also how do you stimulate that kind of access organically? What rituals do you have, if any, that lead to these kinds of soaring leaps in your thinking? Seriously, I'd like answers to this, if you've got them.
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