I sleep well. Look at the chart from my Apple watch. I go to bed just after ten every night, fall asleep within minutes and wake around six. The only thing that disturbs this pattern is travel. Even then, you can see on the chart that apart from days in transit, my pattern simply time-shifted eight hours when I was in Scotland rather than Seattle. I sleep well on the plane, too.
It wasn’t always so. As a teenager, I slept very little, just 3-4 hours a night—so little that my parents consulted a well-known sleep researcher, Ian Oswald, who lived locally. He wired me up a couple of times but saw that my very short periods of sleep were still relatively healthy. By my 40s, I started to sleep for longer. And for now, my pattern is quite regular.
There are a couple of other things worth mentioning. I enjoy sleeping—it is a pleasure to be savored, not a waste of time. I have also had at least some ability to engage with my dreams for much of my life. Some call it Yoga Nidra, some Lucid Dreaming, although I don’t have a formal practice: I just often find that I’m aware of dreaming and of the flow of my dream, and I can somewhat steer it. I learned to do this more purposefully many years ago when a friend told me she kept a dream journal, perhaps influenced by Jungian ideas. Out of curiosity, I also started to keep a record in the morning. I soon found that the more I was aware of my dreams, the more I became aware of dreaming.
As an aside—as I am no expert in this—my thinking about dreams is influenced by the activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed by Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977. This hypothesis suggests that dreams result from the brain interpreting more-or-less random neural activity that occurs during REM sleep. According to this theory, the forebrain (involved in higher-order cognitive functions) attempts to create a coherent narrative or explanation for the chaotic and random signals generated by the brainstem during REM sleep. Again, without formal research, this fits very well with my experience of dreaming, especially the interactions between my dreams and the world around me during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. This can be my most creative time. I have a hunch that dreams are not extended experiences but memories or interpretations we create on waking.
In any case, I am very fortunate.
The paradox of insomnia
Insomnia must be a harrowing condition. I have been reading Marie Darrieussecq's haunting book, Sleepless. As a writer and psychoanalyst, she explores deeply the effects of insomnia through her own life and work and the suffering of others: Duras, Hemingway, Kafka, Ovid, Proust and Woolf.
I find the book beautifully written and painful to read. It is always personal and yet situates her insomnia within a long cultural history. Darrieussecq knows the complex intersection of insomnia and creativity - all those writers and artists and their restlessness! It is almost as if, for some, insomnia becomes a source of inspiration or at least a state of being that feeds into their creativity. However distressing, the quiet of the night and the solitude of insomnia drags out a more arduous creativity. It suggests that insomnia touches on something fundamental about the human condition. Sleep and its absence are central to understanding ourselves.
The sleep of Nobody
Many of you read this newsletter for my thoughts on technology and innovation. I’m getting there.
One of the cool things about Nobody Studios is our restless habit of finding researchers and thinkers whose work and ideas are just calling out to be made more widely available through apps, devices, services or other kinds of products. I have always considered myself a productizer, - which sounds very commercial but means that I want to design, build, package, and deliver technologies for many people rather than being narrowly focused on bespoke solutions or private projects.
One of the experts we work with at Nobody is Gina Poe, who does important and fascinating research into sleep at UCLA. Her work in neuroscience offers compelling insights into why our sleep patterns may profoundly impact creativity.
Dr. Poe has researched the roles of sleep in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and the reorganization of knowledge — all of which are critical components of the creative process. One of her most intriguing findings is how sleep, particularly the phase known as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, facilitates the 'unlearning' of unnecessary connections and the strengthening of novel ones - what she calls synaptic pruning, which allows for the emergence of ideas that might otherwise not surface in the clutter of our waking thoughts.
Understanding the neuroscientific basis of these experiences is fascinating and a little validating as someone who enjoys sleep and its creative renewal. Conversely, for those navigating the tumultuous waters of insomnia, Dr. Poe's research might offer explanations and avenues for mitigating its impact on their creative lives.
At Nobody, one of our new companies, Sleep Glide, aims to find the correct algorithm from Dr. Poe’s work to enable everyone to find the right time, pattern, and rhythm for restful sleep. Marie Darrieussecq tried everything: herbal tea, meditation, weighted blankets, hypnosis, wine, and so many other things.
Sleep Glide aims to guide users to time their sleep onset accurately for optimal sleep quality using real-time feedback. It would be wonderful if we could find the answer to insomniacs' agony and restlessness through their physical signals.
Perhaps in the future, as I get older, I’ll find less comfort in sleep. For now, as Bill Caddick wrote and Christy Moore beautifully sang:
When midnight comes, and people homeward tread,
Seek now your blanket and your feather bed,
Home comes the rover, his journey's over,
Yield up the nighttime to old John O' Dreams.