I have a theory now about sleep.
The only sleep we really need is the slow wave sleep that happens in the first two 90 minute cycles of our night. And even then it's the first cycle of SWS that's pivotal. This is the sleep period where our brain goes into deep repair mode, a sustained bliss that very few of us, except maybe some rockstar monks, are conscious of. The other sleep, the dreaming REM sleep is an important bonus, a delight, like art and entertainment. Our lives are arguably poorer without it, but it's not the essential element of a good sleep. What a good sleep routine does is maximize the probability that you're going to get those first cycles of SWS.
How do we know if we've had the optimal slow wave sleep? We wake up, a few hours after first falling asleep. But rather than this being a pathology, it's a pleasure. A part of sleep that is almost completely ignored by our culture is wakefulness. Nobody sleeps for eight hours straight. We sleep in five to six cycles and we always wake up during these cycles. Most of us don't remember this because we live in a society that crunches all our sleep together. But we wake up. The quality of our sleep is probably more contingent than we realize on the quality of these wakings. If we're startled awake, because we're not getting enough SWS, then the cortisol is probably starting its flow and the optimal SWS is unlikely. If we wake up naturally feeling content and rested, a few hours after falling asleep, then we know we've front loaded our sleep routine with good SWS..
My goal in these three weeks is to start having those contented awakenings. I plan to fall back asleep, into dreams. But I want to see if I can make good SWS a habit.
My friend Jeff Warren says this started happening to him around day 9 of his self-directed sleep retreat. I have a trip to Ottawa planned this week, so I don't know if that will be the right day for me. But I'm going to keep this up until it happens.
