Tag: sleep

Posted in History & Literature

Witching Hour

Posted on by Jinavie

European folklore state that supernatural and paranormal events, such as ghost sightings, tend to occur around the hour between 3am and 4am in the morning. It was believed that if you wake in the middle of the night around 3am, it was because you were visited by the devil. Women were even persecuted as witches if they were found outside during this ungodly hour.

There are many theories behind why the so-called Witching Hour became so infamous. Many involve religious notes, such as the fact that the Bible states that Jesus died at 3pm, therefore the inverse of the time is considered evil. Some say that the devil plays mockery to the Holy Trinity by using the number “3” as part of its acts of desecration. It is also a time when there are no prayers in the canonical hours, therefore evil spirits supposedly run rampant unchecked.

Scientifically speaking, when we wake in the middle of night then fall back asleep, we are more likely to enter a hypnagogic state – the state immediately before you fall asleep where your subconscious mind starts to take over. This can lead to sleep paralysis, which is commonly associated with horrific hallucinations, such as visions of monsters and ghouls. You may even experience a lucid dream, where you are aware within a dream, so you can have vivid memories of imaginary scenes. This may explain why people have such vivid memories of supernatural experiences.

3am is roughly the time of night when melatonin levels are highest, as it is normally when the body is in deep sleep. If you happen to be awake at this time, you may feel exhausted to the point of feeling delirious, as anyone who has done an all-nighter or a night shift could tell you.

From a historical point of view, before the advent of electric lights, it was common to go to bed early in the evening, wake in the night for an hour or two, then go back to sleep until the morning. This hour was used for prayers, writing down creative ideas, interpreting dreams, and of course, sex. Maybe this was also the hour when some people would be out and about for unlawful deeds, such as burglary. These sneaky burglars may have been misinterpreted as ghosts by anyone awake at the same time.

Whether you are superstitious or not, the Witching Hour is an interesting time as you know that everyone around you are asleep. There is no one to talk to. At this edge of tomorrow, you are left alone in tranquil darkness with your thoughts, feelings and worries.

Perhaps the things that go bump in the night during the Witching Hour are not eldritch horrors, but your own fears and anxieties rearing their ugly heads.

(Image source: http://explosm.net/comics/4086/)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Food Coma

Posted on by Jinavie

Why do we feel sleepy after we eat? There are two components to the so-called “food coma”: neurological and hormonal. When we eat, the food mashed up by your teeth is swallowed down the oesophagus and into the stomach, where it is churned in a vat of very strong hydrochloric acid. The acid dissolves the food into liquid form, which is then sent to the small intestines. Here, the chemical components of the food such as carbohydrates is broken into simpler blocks, such as glucose. This is then absorbed into the bloodstream.

The body can actually sense when you have swallowed food, as your stomach stretches and sends signals to the brain. This triggers the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system (opposite of the sympathetic nervous system, which is the “fight or flight” system). The parasympathetic nervous system is involved in digesting and rest. It stimulates stomach acid production, gut movement and even reduces your energy level so that digestion can happen smoothly. In old people, it can even decrease blood pressure enough to a point that they feel dizzy (much like head rush). This is the neurological component.

The hormonal component is linked with the absorption phase of digestion. To deal with the increasing level of glucose in your blood, the pancreas secretes insulin. Insulin rounds up the glucose in the blood and stores it away in cells to normalise the blood glucose level. In this process, it also stimulates the uptake of certain amino acids (building blocks of protein) into cells. However, it leaves out one type of amino acids called tryptophan. Because there is more tryptophan in the blood compared to the other amino acids, your brain decides to use this to build more proteins. Tryptophan is converted in the brain into a very important neurotransmitter called serotonin, which is then converted into melatonin. Melatonin is a neurotransmitter involved in triggering sleep. Therefore, through this extremely complicated pathway, food causes sleepiness.

At face value, this makes it look like increasing intake of tryptophan may help induce sleep. It is commonly said that turkey meat and bananas help you sleep because of tryptophan. But this is an urban myth as neither of these foods are particularly high in tryptophan and there is no evidence to suggest that tryptophan itself helps you sleep. Then again, melatonin supplements have some evidence supporting it as a sleep aide. This shows just how complicated the human body can be.

Posted in Simple Pleasures of Life

Simple Pleasures of Life #11

Posted on by Jinavie

Sleep.

Sleep seems to be the most contradicting thing in my life. So often I wish I didn’t have to sleep so I could do more in my day, yet I fucking LOVE sleep. I’d sleep centuries if I could. There’s something nice about the thought that every day, you just switch off for a little while (except for dreams which are awesome in their own right). Plus, I find the subject of sleep absolutely fascinating, as you probably gathered from my pile of ARK posts…

Posted in Life & Happiness

Sweet Dreams

Posted on by Jinavie

Every night, just before I fall asleep, I make a small wish that I will have sweet dreams tonight. But I cannot help but wonder if I will wake up with a smile because it was pleasant, or if I will wake up with a sense of emptiness and sadness because it was a bittersweet dream that will never come true. In the end, I guess it does not matter, as those dreams will fade away, like tears in rain.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Sleeping Sickness

Posted on by Jinavie

A woman travelling in Africa is bitten by what appears to be a mosquito. She swats the insect and keeps on going about her journey. The next week, she finds that she has a small nodule where she was bit. She is also feeling slightly unwell, with fever and fatigue. Over the following two weeks, her fever worsens (coming and going intermittently) and she notices large lumps along the back of her neck. By this stage, she is experiencing muscle and joint pain as well. After returning home from her trip, she finds that her symptoms have not resolved. On top of her fever and pains, she begins experiencing headaches, mood swings, lethargy, confusion, clumsiness, delayed response to pain, sleepiness during the day and insomnia at night. She begins to worry that something is wrong, but she believes that it is a bad flu and does not see a doctor. Her symptoms worsen with time (sleeping up to 15 hours a day), until one day, she falls asleep and does not wake up. She is taken to a hospital, where it is discovered she is in a coma. She dies within a week.

This is the typical presentation of sleeping sickness, also known as human African trypanosomiasis. It is an infectious disease caused by a protozoan parasite called Trypanosoma brucei (comes in two types: T. brucei rhodesiense (East African type) and T. brucei gambiense (West African type)), which is transmitted by tsetse flies – a bloodsucking fly endemic to sub-Saharan Africa (there are also case reports of sexual transmission between people). When infected, the parasite rapidly proliferates in the patient’s bloodstream. It is not detected by the host immune system, thanks to a surface protein called VSG. This allows it to spread through the patient swiftly and silently via the circulatory and lymphatic systems. The early symptoms (intermittent fever, rash, lymph node enlargement), typically presenting about a week or two after infection, are due to the parasite spreading through the blood and lymph. As the infection spreads, the parasites begin to invade the central nervous system (although in the West African type of the disease, patients often die from the toxic effects of the parasite replicating in the blood before they reach this stage).

As the infection spreads through the CNS, it causes the neurological symptoms described in the case. The sleepiness (from where the disease gets its name from) worsens as the disease progresses, with patients finding it difficult to wake up in the morning, even sleeping for over 20 hours. The sleepiness is caused by a chemical called tryptophol, which is produced by the parasite. Essentially, the neurological symptoms appear as if the person’s brain is slowing down, until they fall into a coma, resulting in death without treatment (usually within 2~3 years since the infection).

Sleeping sickness is invariably fatal unless treated early. Once the patient reaches the second stage (neurological phase), treatment becomes very difficult. The current first line treatment is a drug called melarsoprol, which is a form of arsenic. Because of its toxic nature, it is extremely dangerous and there is around an 8% chance of the patient dying from side effects. Fortunately, there are less dangerous and more effective treatments such as eflornithine (which only works for the West African type) being developed.

Posted in History & Literature

Incubus

Posted on by Jinavie

An incubus, much like a succubus, is a demon that visits in a dream or while a person is sleeping. An incubus is the male counterpart to the succubus and shares many of its characteristics, such as visiting a person to have sex with them (since it is male, it only attacks women). According to legends, a woman pregnant after having sex with an incubus gives birth to a stillborn or a deformed child. The legend of the incubus most likely arose to explain the hallucinations seen with sleep paralysis and a pregnancy out of wedlock or from a shameful relationship. During the Renaissance when the culture was less restrained around sex than the Middle ages, there was a rise in cases of young girls giving birth to stillborns without knowing who the father was, resulting in debates to whether an incubus could really impregnate a woman.

The most famous “child” of an incubus is Merlin from the King Arthur legends. Merlin’s mother was a woman of high class but gave birth to Merlin after being attacked by an incubus. She was afraid that Merlin would turn out to be an evil person so she took him to the church to cleanse his body. This left Merlin with only mysterious powers, allowing him to be one of the most famous wizards in fiction.

Posted in Life & Happiness

How To Sleep

Posted on by Jinavie

Do you suffer from insomnia? Tossing and turning in bed for hours every night while enduring the onslaught of fatigue and a sense of uneasiness is hard on both the body and the mind. There are many “remedies” such as drinking warm milk or exercising lightly but those rarely help. If you find yourself staring into the dark ceiling and unable to fall asleep again tonight, try the following trick.

First, calm your mind and breathe deeply. As you breathe in, count “one”. Remove all other thoughts and focus on the 1. Now, breathe out. As you breathe out, count “two”. Inhale, 1. Exhale, 2. Inhale, 1. Exhale, 2. If you think about nothing other than your breathing and counting, you will find yourself drifting off into dreamland in no time.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Hypnagogia

Posted on by Jinavie

Every person has had the experience of having a few seconds of brilliance just before their consciousness slips into sleep. During this short moment, we have some of the most creative and innovative ideas. Unfortunately, this is all lost by the time we wake up. This state is known as the hypnagogic state and has been well known since ancient Greece. Many philosophers and writers such as Aristotle and Edgar Allan Poe have written on the subject and how they received some of their greatest ideas in this state. 

Recent researches show that during hypnagogia, thought processes and cognition vastly differs to normal wakefulness. It appears that hypnagogic cognition is more based on the subconscious mind, with people in this state being more open to suggestion (e.g. hypnosis). Ideas seem to flow in a fluid yet illogical way and they are based on external stimuli, thus explaining the heightened suggestibility as the brain incorporates the surrounding into its thought process. The thought process is also less restricted, leading to openness and sensitivity. A process called autosymbolism occurs where abstract ideas that we are thinking are converted into concrete images. This explains the artistic inspiration seen in hypnagogia.

One of the more pronounced phenomena of hypnagogia is insight. It has been noted by many people throughout history that the moment before sleep is when we have the best ideas. For example, a chemist called August Kekulé realised that benzene was a ring structure after seeing an image of snakes biting each other’s tails to form a ring. Because of this, many famous artists and inventors tried to harness the power of hypnagogia through techniques such as the Dalí nap. Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Beethoven and Richard Wagner also practised similar techniques to gain insight into a problem that they were trying to solve or bring fresh ideas.

Another fascinating side of hypnagogia is the strange sensory phenomena associated with it. As in the case of sleep paralysis (which usually occurs in hypnapomp – the state between sleep and waking up), people often report strong hallucinations in the form of bright colours, geometric shapes, or even nightmarish visions (such as a ghost sitting on your chest). Other senses are affected as well, such as hearing whispering (commonly associated with the nightmarish hallucinations mentioned above) or out-of-body experiences. Hypnic jerks are also common, where the person jerks awake just before drifting off to sleep. This is thought to be caused by the brain misinterpreting sleep as “death” or the body shutting down, leading it to jolt the system back to life. 

Finally, an interesting psychological phenomenon is the Tetris effect, where people who have spent a prolonged time on one activity cannot stop seeing images and thinking about that activity in the hypnagogic state. This was seen in people who had played too much Tetris seeing coloured bricks before they went to sleep. Other common versions of the Tetris effect include chess boards and pieces, feeling waves after being at sea and seeing words and numbers after working on documents for a long time.

The combination of insight, creativity and sensory illusions leads to hypnagogia causing strange “experiences”. Ergo, hypnagogia is now thought to explain many supernatural experiences such as ghost sightings, UFO abductions, premonitions and visions.

Posted in History & Literature

Succubus

Posted on by Jinavie

A succubus is a demon that takes the form of an attractive human woman to seduce men, tempting them to have sex with her. Through sex, the succubus leeches away the man’s life force until he wilts away. They tend to visit men in their dreams and use their beauty and charm to lure and enchant their victim. A famous example of a succubus is Lilith, the first wife of Adam. There are other similar demons throughout the world, such as the nine-tailed fox in Asia (kumiho in Korea, kitsune in Japan and Hulijing in China). A similar demon is an incubus – the male equivalent of a succubus.

The origin of the succubus may be explained medically. It is well known that sleep paralysis is related to vivid hallucinations in the hypnagogic state, with countless cases of alien abductions and supernatural sightings ascribed to the phenomenon.

However, another explanation may be that the succubus is an allegory of the femme fatale. Femme fatale – French for “deadly woman” – describes a mysterious and seductive woman who uses her womanly charms to ensnare and manipulate men. A femme fatale is highly able in utilising the various tools at her disposal: beauty, charm, sexual allure, music, seductive dancing, persuasive language, deception, coercion, hypnotising and generally toying with a man’s reproductive instincts.

There are many examples of how different femme fatales – ranging from the biblical Eve to the spy Mata Hari – made an impact in history through the elaborate manipulation of men to their advantage. This is reflected in folklore through the concept of witches and enchantresses who use “magic” and sexual charms to have men do their bidding, essentially having them on a leash.

Essentially, the moral of the story of the succubus (that is, to men) that women can be deadly and are completely capable of sapping a man’s life away if she wished so. That is why men should know when they are actively being deceived or being controlled by a woman with (false) promises of love and sex. Perhaps the flipside moral of the story for women is that with the power of sex, a woman can have a man do anything for her – a valid strategy that has proven to be effective for all of recorded history.

Posted in Science & Nature

Caffeine

Posted on by Jinavie

Coffee is a magical drink that can make a busy person’s morning. Coffee’s stimulant effect is due to the substance called caffeine. Caffeine can make the mind more alert and drives away sleepiness for about 3~4 hours. This is why students studying for an exam or people working late love to drink coffee.
There are many students who say they do not like coffee and drink energy drinks instead. These drinks tend to advertise that the substances guarana and taurine give energy, but an interesting fact is that guarana is just a plant where caffeine is extracted from. Taurine has many beneficial actions in the body, but has no effect as a stimulant. Therefore, an energy drink is simply made of caffeine and sugar and holds no advantage over coffee.

Although caffeine is beneficial in moderate amounts, excessive consumption leads to adverse effects. A normal adult can handle up to about 400mg of caffeine. Any more and they could suffer from anxiety, insomnia, headaches, dehydration, increased urination, fever, rising heart rate, stomach pain, nausea and many other symptoms. As everyone’s rate of caffeine metabolism is different, only they know how much caffeine they can consume. Furthermore, the more coffee or tea you drink, you build a tolerance towards caffeine and can consume much more without adverse effects.

The following is a list of the caffeine content in common drinks and foods:

  • Drip coffee(200ml): 150mg
  • Espresso(50ml): 100mg (this is because the cups are small, the concentration is about 3 times that of drip coffee)
  • Caffeine tablet: 100mg
  • Energy drink(250ml): 80mg
  • Coca-cola(600ml): 60mg
  • Chocolate(250g): 60mg
  • Black tea(170ml): 50mg
  • Green tea(170ml): 30mg
  • Decaffeinated coffee(200ml): 10mg

However, the best method to drive away sleepiness is by sleeping. If you are tired, the only way to recover is by taking a 30 minute to 2 hour nap, especially if you will be driving or have a night shift.