136,000 Hours of Dreaming and Counting
29 Apr 2007I’ve always been fascianated with sleep. I’m not sure why, but its one of the few human behaviors that actually interests me. I remember discovering a book in the University of Michigan Graduate library on the -3 third level (the minus is not a mistake) called “Some must watch while others sleep”. The author was the same person (his name escapes me) who coined the phrase “Rapid Eye Movement” commonly refered to as REM sleep. I was simply amazed at the accounts of sleep disorders and theories as to why we sleep. Discover recently published an article called “20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Sleep”. One fact caught my attention:
Dreaming is connected to bursts of electrical activity that blow through the brain stem every 90 minutes during REM sleep. Over a lifetime, an average person spends more than six years dreaming, clocking more than 136,000 [hours] in all.
Now that’s some power napping.