Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions (6 page)

Lack of sleep will alter your sleep stages, resulting in what is called REM rebound, the lengthening and intensifying of REM sleep after stretches of sleep deprivation. If you crawl into bed exhausted, having accrued recent sleep debt, you will bypass the first few sleep stages and jump right into REM dream sleep. But recalling these REM rebound dreams becomes difficult because your body’s need for deep sleep wins out and you sleep like a rock, spending the majority of the night in N3. Thus, sleep deprivation is a dream stealer in terms of recall.

While you can acclimate your mind to a sleep-deprived schedule, your body cannot adjust and function at peak performance. The sleep debt will show up in your delayed reaction times, poor judgment and other impaired functions. And not only do you harm yourself when you scrimp and catch only twenty winks; you also endanger others. The National Sleep Foundation’s website says that according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 100,000 police-reported crashes annually are due to driver fatigue, resulting in around 71,000 injuries, more than 1,500 deaths and $12.5 billion in economic losses.
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In addition, in 2007 the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard University published an article entitled “Sleep Performance and Public Safety” that disclosed how lack of sleep quality or quantity can lead to costly workplace miscalculations and blunders that endanger lives and the environment around us. Listen to this:

Investigators have ruled that sleep deprivation was a significant factor in the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, as well as the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.

Investigations of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker, as well as the explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger
, have concluded that sleep deprivation also played a critical role in these accidents. In both cases, those in charge of the operations and required to make critical decisions were operating under extreme sleep deprivation. While the
Challenger
disaster put the
multi-billion dollar shuttle program in peril, the Exxon Valdez oil spill resulted in incalculable ecological, environmental, and economic damage.
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The Chernobyl meltdown or the
Challenger
explosion may not have affected you, but sleep-deprivation disasters affect your doctors and local hospitals. Between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths and over 1 million needless injuries take place annually as a direct consequence of medical mishaps, according to the Institutes of Medicine, and they report that many of those are the product of insufficient sleep.
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And after med school, it is the newest doctor graduates completing their internships who are often called on to work back-to-back shifts of 24 to 36 hours with little or no sleep. Interestingly enough, when I sat with Dr. Evans in Nashville last summer for our interview, the first piece of information he volunteered was a testimony about his own sleep debt during medical school and afterward, during his residency. For three years he worked 36-hour shifts, which were, as he put it, “interrupted by 0–3 hours of fragmented sleep.” At the conclusion of the 36 hours, he would sleep like a rock for 11–12 hours and then do it all over again. Granted, he was only a resident, but by the end of each week he had totaled 120 hours on duty, more often than not. Although he smiled and said he did fine grabbing those fragmented hours of sleep when he could, I find it ironic that after such sleep deprivation, he completed that residency and went on to specialize in sleep medicine during his fellowship at George Washington University, where he studied to become a pulmonologist. (And I will take a sleep doctor over a sleepy doctor any day of the week.)

Likewise, Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine issued a study led by Dr. Charles Czeisler divulging that hospitals could reduce their medical mistakes and oversights by an outstanding 36 percent by limiting doctors’ shifts to no more than 16 hours at a time, with a weekly work load not to exceed 80 hours.
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This was a fact Dr. Evans also alluded to during our
conversation, when he said that just a few years after he graduated, studies were done that prompted government intervention to regulate hospital shifts, promptly putting an end to such long rotations for the students following in Dr. Evans’s footsteps.

And let’s not forget the Colgan Air crash on February 12, 2009, that killed all 49 people on board and someone in the house the plane hit. That crash, later linked to pilot fatigue, prompted a string of investigations of all the major regional airlines in America. The victims’ families took their voices to Capitol Hill and asked the government to pick up the airlines’ slack if they were not going to regulate pilot schedules and commuter demands, and also pay pilots enough so that they did not have to sleep on crew lounge sofas the night before a flight. Or worse, in “pilot crash pads,” tiny near-airport apartments lined with dozens of bunk beds crowded together in often unsanitary conditions. These accommodations are often all a starter pilot making $16K per year can afford to rent. In February 2011, the ABC News program
Nightline
broadcast a story on the two-year anniversary of the Colgan crash to see if these airline amendments had been enforced. The story reported that “little has changed.”
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But fear not, the tide will turn. Just as fewer than fifty years ago we did not understand the deadly effects of tobacco, we also have not fully understood the deadly effects of too little sleep until now. But the world is waking up to it. Are you in your own life?

If you typically fall asleep within five minutes of lying down—whether at night or for a nap—you may have a sleep debt and be suffering from extreme sleep deprivation. According to Dr. Evans, sleep debt is not cleared up with one night’s good sleep. Sometimes it takes two or more. He says the first night you will spend in N3 deep sleep, and on the second night
you will regain your REM cycles. That is another argument to either support getting ample sleep or quit complaining that you never dream.

Just for Fun

If you are curious about your own sleeping habits and cycles but do not need a doctor-supervised sleep study, why not try out one of the many downloadable sleep cycle apps on your iPhone or Android? I typed “sleep cycles” in the search field of my iPhone’s App Store and came up with over a hundred apps. Then I typed in “sleep” and came up with two thousand more. The same was true for Androids, and I am about to suggest a dozen popular choices for both types of smartphones (all of which were available at the time of this book’s publication). Some are free, but none of them cost more than a few dollars.

How do these apps work? Using your Android or iPhone’s extremely sensitive accelerometer, they monitor your movements during sleep when you place the phone near (but not under) your pillow. After spending a summer studying EMFs (electromagnetic fields), I am not a fan of sleeping near electronics, and I worked on ridding my home of “dirty electricity” and rearranging it to have less concentrated “hot spots.” But when I weighed the risks against investing just a few nights in finding ways to improve my sleep (and therefore my overall health), I went for it. Here are a dozen app suggestions for you if you’re curious about that third of your life you have been missing.

For the iPhone, I downloaded Sleep Checker, Sleep Time, Smart Alarm Clock, Sleep Cycle, Sleep Lab Snore Monitor and my personal favorite, Sleep Bot, which not only allows you to keep up with your sleep trends in a history log but also emails them to you for further study. But most impressively, it educates you about sleep debt and helps you calculate and control yours, while also offering dietary suggestions of foods that will help you go to sleep (or stay awake when need be).

For Android, there is Sleep Diary, Sleep Right, 90 Minutes, Sleep Cycles, Electric Sleep and Sleep As Android, which is getting rave reviews and already boasts between 1 million and 5 million downloads. Sleep As Android includes sleeptalk recording, go-to-bed notifications, antisnoring features, sleep graph history, deep sleep stats, nature alarm sounds and even lullabies for sleep.

Most of these apps aim to track your sleep stages in order to avoid awakening you during deep sleep, because waking up during this stage can be the reason you are groggy and hard to rouse each morning (even when you sleep a full forty winks). You set a thirty-minute wake-up time window, and the app smartly adjusts the wake-up time once it senses the smaller movements of a lighter sleep stage. Some of the apps even claim that after a few nights, they can learn your REM cycles and wake you up during the final one so that you can remember those vivid dreams.

Some of the apps only wake you, some only lull you to sleep, but some will do everything but drag you out of bed and make you breakfast. The interfaces on many of these apps are slick. The most humorous sleep app award from me goes to Help I Can’t Sleep’s “Dream Recorder,” a hilarious animated app that pokes fun at the dream app theory and posts amusing (and often embarrassing) made-up dreams from you on Facebook and Twitter. Not on your life!

Some of the apps are based on the theory that if a normal night’s sleep consists of four to six full 90-minute sleep cycles, then an app can predict when you need to awaken and have the alarm sound during your lightest sleep phase of the final cycle. Trouble is, not every full sleep cycle is 90 minutes. Some of these apps are therefore ineffectual, but nonetheless amusing. Hey, if something has a chance of turning me into a morning person, I am all for it.

If you are in the mood to lay down $150 for a watch/wristband that claims to track your sleep cycles within 95 percent of the accuracy of sleep monitors used in professional sleep studies, then the SleepTracker is for you. It was even voted Invention of the Year by
Time
magazine.

None of these apps can replace a more sophisticated sleep study, and none will reveal sleep apneas or other sleep disorders. They will, however, give you an inside glance into a third of your life that you have never cognitively experienced. Using one to monitor your sleep is like reading a postcard from yourself to yourself the next morning.

Please avoid apps that promote lucid dreaming or hypnotherapy, however, as well as those that play preprogrammed phrases and tones while you sleep. You could be throwing wide open a door in your spirit and asking for trouble. (Check out the personal interview on lucid dreaming in chapter 10.)

“Sleep Sound” Advice

Circadian rhythms are our miraculous inner wirings toward a schedule, sort of like a biological clock.
Circadian
is Latin for “around a day” and means “recurring naturally on a twenty-four-hour cycle, even in the absence of light fluctuations: a circadian rhythm.”
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But because light has so much influence on us, people’s internal clocks changed drastically with the invention of electricity. Now we do not have to go to bed when the sun goes down because we can flip a switch and stay up for hours longer.

Trouble is, the sun still rises the next morning, and our bodies begin responding before we ever awaken. Why? Because light shuts off the production of melatonin, a hormone that increases at dark and produces drowsiness. Light, with all of its signals, hits your retinas, crosses your optic nerves, travels to the hypothalamus and into your suprachiasmatic nucleus (or SCN), where about twenty thousand neurons are waiting to take those signals and dead-end at your pineal gland.
Wham!
The pineal gland tells the melatonin its job is done and shuts down production. All of a sudden, you are not drowsy anymore. This is why it is so important that if you get up for that middle-of-the-night bathroom break, you leave the lights off so that you can remain drowsy.

So many factors alter our body rhythms, such as alarm clocks, the neighbor dog’s annoying barking, the baby needing that 2:00 a.m. feeding or even the timing of our meals. Circadian rhythms are even responsible for that sluggish feeling you suffer when you cross into another time zone. You call it jet lag.

Laura’s ABCs for ZZZs Sleep Tips

Earlier we compared the sleep stages to gears, so think of your nightly descent toward bedtime as starting the engine of a car. Here are some keys to use for a great ride into dreamland:

A.
Abstain from all caffeine, nicotine and alcohol since they
can lead to insomnia.
Caffeine is lurking in many things including chocolate, soft drinks, nonherbal teas, diet pills, energy drinks and of course, coffee. And remember, alcohol in any form may sometimes help you fall asleep, but you will not stay asleep. For deep sleep, skip the nightcap. Finally, consider that smoking is not just bad for your lungs, but bad for sleep cycles due to waking up with nicotine withdrawals. Let this be the year that you rid your body of all such habit-forming, life-altering substances.

B.
Bedtime Math.
Consider your required wake-up time the next morning and subtract at least 8½ hours from it to determine your bedtime. That allows 15 minutes to wind down (doing my Sleep ABCs for ZZZs), 15 minutes to actually fall asleep and 8 hours to actually sleep. If you need to rise at 6:00 a.m., then be done with your Sleep ABCs and in bed no later than 9:45 p.m. You can adjust the times to fit your schedule. Midnight to 8:00 a.m. has always served my schedule well, but my challenge as a writer is that once I am finally enjoying a quiet house late
at night, it is easy to get a second wind and breeze right past midnight. Make promises to yourself to be at step C (which follows) 15 minutes before bedtime each night.

C.
Create room atmosphere and temperature.
As you are beginning your descent toward bedtime and heading to the bedroom or bathroom to prepare, use soft lighting to begin adjusting your circadian rhythms, which signals your brain to pump out the drowsy juice, melatonin. Adjust the temperature to a bit cooler than during the day, but remember that too hot or too cold causes constant tossing and turning. Perhaps turn on a fan for some white noise.