As the semester progresses and professors conspire to have every midterm and assignment due in the same two weeks, many of us end up ignoring sleep or adopting cursed sleep schedules.
This isn’t an article warning you against losing sleep — sometimes life’s just like that. Instead, here are some adventures that can come your way with disrupted sleep.
But first, the basics of sleep
One third of our entire lives is spent asleep, which is a ridiculously high amount of time just being unconscious if you ask me. So what even is the point of sleep?
There is no direct answer for this question yet. What we do know are various factoids that create a picture of what happens during sleep.
Sleep is an altered state of consciousness that cycles through four stages four to six times a night, with a whole cycle lasting about 100–800 minutes. The first three stages are called non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, which includes the transition between being awake and asleep, being fully asleep, and finally, deep sleep.
The fourth stage is REM sleep, when brain activity spikes or becomes about as active as when we are awake; this is when dreaming happens. Your muscles are also limp at this stage, so you don’t actually act out your dreams.
Sleep is thought to be critical for growth, repair, recovery, and memory consolidation, so it is understandable that a chronic lack of sleep has been associated with health disorders affecting the immune function, cognition, metabolic, and even cardiovascular diseases.
We also know that without sleep, our motor functions decline, our cognitive abilities slow, and in some cases, we will die.
Those are all the more serious complications of sleep deprivation that we’ve all been told about, but they seem fairly unlikely when you’re regularly sleep deprived.
Some of the more interesting — or terrifying — things that can potentially happen on a more immediate basis include fun things like encountering sleep paralysis demons, trippy lucid dreams, and just straight-up hallucinations — not speaking from personal experience or anything.
The demons that be
Inadequate sleep or an irregular sleep schedule, among other causes, has been associated with the appearance of sleep paralysis demons. Sleep paralysis is essentially when you are awake but unable to move. This occurs when you wake up during the REM stage of sleep. So, sometimes you can just see figures approaching from the corner of your eye as you remain unable to move.
These sleep paralysis hallucinations can be anywhere from visual, auditory, to tactile, which can be fairly terrifying when you believe you are facing a demon. But rest assured, sleep paralysis demons pose no real danger, though it probably does not help anxiety symptoms for some. Either way, it is certainly a super fun way to wake up!
Why does that lamp look weird?
On a similar line, there are lucid dreams. This is when you become aware of the fact that you are dreaming. Instances of lucid dreams have been recorded for centuries and even scientifically confirmed in the ’70s–’80s through experiments where a subject moves their eyes in a particular pre-established sequence once they gain awareness of their dreams. For example, some people may notice that the furniture in a dream location that matches reality looks like it was rearranged.
There are many accounts about ways to reach this stage, but if you have a disturbed sleep schedule, it may just reach you whether you want it or not. In fact, lucid dreaming has been somewhat associated with highly fragmented sleep patterns, which can occur if you take 20-minute naps with the lights on as you attempt an all-nighter — or so I’ve been told.
Do you guys hear voices, or is that just me?
Both sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming are related to when you actually sleep, but let’s take the no-sleeping route next?.
On this path, many physiological things can happen. In fact, prolonged sleep deprivation is labelled as torture. Symptoms like delusions and hallucinations develop more and more with time awake until they devolve into full-blown acute psychosis. Though once you sleep, this is usually resolved.
While awake, though, even the beginning stages can be fairly trippy. For instance, people have told me they experienced bugs off the corners of their eyes, voices having a conversation in an empty room, or silhouettes following them.
So, while those late nights at Robarts or nocturnal study habits may feel a bit inevitable, keep in mind that they may also come with some free — and sometimes terrifying — experiences featuring shadowy figures and rearranged dream furniture. So, enjoy your adventure if you choose to accept it.
