While the occurrence is rare, brain damage has now been linked to potential sleep risks. This may not necessarily be surprising but with a back up from a sleep study, who unfortunately have to deal with traumatic experiences associated with their brain are likely to suffer from reduced amounts of melatonin and cause sleep problems.

Australian researchers found that:

• Healthy people produce more melatonin than do people with brain injuries during evening hours, when the chemical is supposed to rise to trigger sleep.
• Patients with brain injury spent less time in bed actually sleeping; that is, they had less “sleep efficiency.”
• Brain injury patients spent more time awake after first falling asleep.
• Brain-injured people spent more time in non-REM sleep.
• Patients with brain injuries had more symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Image Credits: Wikipedia

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What does it do? Basically, you can rank top 5 on Google search terms for your keyword such as “sleep wiki”, “sleep disorders wiki”, etc…etc…

Here’s a little bit of what it is:

The Quarter Wiki is a new paid online encyclopedia where you can buy your own page for just a quarter.

Unlike Wikipedia, you can add videos, RSS Feeds, Google Ads, and GoogleMaps to a page on the QuarterWiki.

More simply, QuarterWiki filters spam by charging a small fee for each page so you don’t have to deal with it.

To get started with QuarterWiki, sign up for an account and search for your desired words you’d like to purchase.

[via] Bedzine.com

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We all tend to overlook this part of our everyday living. Usually, sleep disorders can be attributed to various reasons. Some of them can be traced towards stress, while others coming from hereditary reasons.

As explained by Wikipedia:

Sleep apnea or sleep apnoea is a sleep disorder characterized by pauses in breathing during sleep. These episodes, called apneas (literally, “without breath”), each last long enough so one or more breaths are missed, and occur repeatedly throughout sleep. The standard definition of any apneic event includes a minimum 10 second interval between breaths, with either a neurological arousal (3-second or greater shift in EEG frequency, measured at C3, C4, O1, or O2), or a blood oxygen desaturation of 3-4 percent or greater, or both arousal and desaturation. Sleep apnea is diagnosed with an overnight sleep test called polysomnogram.

Clinically significant levels of sleep apnea are defined as 5 events of any type or greater per hour of sleep time (from the polysomnogram). There are two distinct forms of sleep apnea: Central and Obstructive. Breathing is interrupted by the lack of effort in Central Sleep Apnea; in Obstructive Sleep Apnea, breathing is interrupted by a physical block to airflow despite effort. In Mixed Sleep Apnea, there is a transition from central to obstructive features during the events themselves.

Regardless of type, the individual with sleep apnea is rarely aware of having difficulty breathing, even upon awakening. Sleep apnea is recognized as a problem by others witnessing the individual during episodes or is suspected because of its effects on the body (sequelae). Symptoms may be present for years, even decades without identification, during which time the sufferer may become conditioned to the daytime sleepiness and fatigue associated with significant levels of sleep disturbance. The definitive diagnosis of sleep apnea is made by polysomnography. – Sleep Apnea

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Randy Gardner still holds the world record for 264 hours of sleeplessness as a 17 year old kid back in 1964.

Randy Gardner holds a Guinness world record for the longest period of time a human being has intentionally gone without sleep not using stimulants of any kind. In 1964, as a 17-year-old high school student in San Diego, California, Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) with the help of friends, TV reporters, and shooting hoops. On his final day without sleep, Gardner presided over a press conference where he spoke without slurring or stumbling his words and in general appeared to be in excellent health. “I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep,” said Gardner. “I thought, ‘I can break that (Peter Tripp’s 1959) record and I don’t think it would be a negative experience.’” Sleep experts now believe that such sleep deprivation stunts are dangerous

via wikipedia

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What is polyphasic sleep? Well, according to Wikipedia,

Polyphasic sleep is a sleep pattern intended to reduce sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day.

Facinating, isn’t it? Here’s a guy who’s trying it right now:

I’m starting this polyphasic sleep schedule today, so last night was my last night of “normal” sleep for a while. I still got up at 5am this morning, and then I’ll begin doing the naps every 4 hours starting this afternoon. I’ll use a countdown timer alarm set for 30 minutes, so I won’t oversleep. I’ve decided that my sleep times will be 1am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, and 9pm. I aim to continue at least until Halloween… or death, whichever comes first. If it seems to be going well and I retain basic functionality, then I’ll decide whether I want to continue with it.

Remember, if you have an irregular schedule or work on and off, this polyphasic sleep might just do the trick for your sleeping.

Check out Uberman’s sleep schedule also, which seems to be a type of polyphasic sleep.

Picture via interactingarts

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Lucid dreaming is when you know you are dreaming inside a dream. I am sure many of you have had that experience before. There are ways to increase your chances of having a Lucid dream. Wikipedia has a good list of induction methods for lucid dreaming including these:

• Fall asleep while focused on your intention to remember that you’re dreaming.
• Let yourself genuinely believe that you’ll become lucid—without intending to become lucid—so that you really will.
• Keep your consciousness while falling asleep and go straight into a dream.
• Wake after some sleep and then return to bed.
• By repetitive visualisation, incubate a dream in which you do a reality check.

I’ve personally have been successful by watching my hand and telling myself, “Am I dreaming?”, to associate my hand with that sentence.  Since hand is used often, I can remind myself once I start dreaming.

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Wikipedia has a nice description of sleep paralysis:

a condition characterized by temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis) or, less often, shortly before falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis)

Stanford University has a nice definition of sleep paralysis too.

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