Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams
A brilliant overview of that most vital, most underrated and most elusive of human activities, sleep.Using the approach and skills he deployed to such successful effect on the relationship between mind and body in the prize-winning ‘The Sickening Mind’, likeable British popular science author Paul Martin here tackles the science of that most mysterious, elusive and alluring of human activities, sleeping, and draws on both cutting-edge neuroscience and classic literature to do so.We spend one third of our lives asleep, but know hardly anything about it, and can remember so little of it as we come out of it. Why?Are dreams the place we go to resolve our problems, emasculate our fears and rehearse our hopes? Why are we paralysed when we dream? Why did sleep evolve?And is anybody getting enough sleep?
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COUNTING SHEEP
The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams
PAUL MARTIN
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperPress 2003
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002
Copyright © Paul Martin 2002
Paul Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006551720
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007406784 Version: 2016-02-11
Contents
The price of eternal vigilance is liberty
Tired people are stupid and reckless
Falling asleep again, what am I to do?
Meditating â or only sleeping?
7: Strange Tales of Erections and Yawning
8: Friends and Enemies of Sleep
Things that go bump in the night
Poppy, mandragora and drowsy syrups
9: The Children of an Idle Brain?
Old and grey and full of sleep
Nightmares, night terrors, sleep paralysis and the Old Hag
Man ⦠consumes more than one third of his life in this his irrational situation.
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1801)
Sleep: a state so familiar yet so strange. It is the single most common form of human behaviour and you will spend a third of your life doing it â 25 years or more, all being well. When you die, a bigger slice of your existence will have passed in that state than in making love, raising children, eating, playing games, listening to music, or any of those other activities that humanity values so highly.
Sleep is a form of behaviour, just as eating or socialising or fighting or copulating are forms of behaviour, even if it is not the most gripping to observe. Most of the action goes on inside the brain. It is also a uniquely private experience, even when sharing a bed. When we are awake we all inhabit a common world, but when we sleep each of us occupies a world of our own. Most of us, however, have precious little awareness of what we experience in that state. Our memories of sleeping and dreaming mostly evaporate when we awake, erasing the record every morning.
