Sleep, the saviour

Sleep is a helping intervention.

Sleeping is beautiful. No matter how much one wants to keep awake, she would love her sleep. If you are a morning riser, nothing seems more beautiful than catching up a few last fleeing naps. Alarms go on snooze mode as if they act on their own. You don't remember doing anything to alarm many a time. You regret having overslept only when some emotional or financial matter is involved about time on that particular day. 

There are only few people who wake up from slumber to do nothing. Sleep is like charging the ever dying battery of your cellphone. Even if the battery is dying, you wish it lasts till you reach home in the evening. Yet you can't resist the temptation of scanning one or the other app anticipating any SocMed droplets. As you reach home and plug your charger in the socket and connect your phone, you feel having been resuscitated.

Once I heard a few psychologists and psychiatrists saying on Doordarshan that "loss of sleep does induce any chemical change in brain". Also heard in a BBC radio documentary that "sleeping is an acquired character".

Acquired means human beings were originally not meant to sleep. They didn't require to sleep to keep doing what they did - hunt, eat, defecate and procreate. But as they developed a line of thinking that goaded them for doing non-consumptive work, they started hunting more than they required. Food became a little surplus. The feeble bodied - owing to old age or post-infancy-childhood emotional connect - started getting food arranged by more able-bodied persons. This led to the arrival of non-essential leisure.

Animals take rest because they understand their food takes time to get digested and also to store energy for next hunt. Humans developed a different tendency of not-putting in extra hard work that someone else could do. But this could lead to fights among the herd, we now call community. Privilege must have been challenged as those who were going out to hunt and gather food put their lives at risk.

Life has, naturally, been more prized than emotion or finances. Love for one's life is the fundamental cause behind the demand for right to equality. By the generation this fight for equality happened, the humans might have developed skills, tools and art of hunting big with greater ease. This gave them plenty of leisure.

Secondly, humans are one of those species which can't see in the dark. Their eyes are equipped to see only in the light. It is not certain if they ever had the ability to see in the dark. It is largely presumed that during their hunting-gathering phase, they did not have the ability to see in the dark. They had to have forced-leisure at night when the sun lit the other half of the world.

But some of the animals, humans hunted and which must have identified humans as their enemies, had the ability to see in the dark. A number of predators see with their thermal imaging powers. Movement by humans would have made them an easy target. Animals know that life moves. Movement is a sign of life. Moving object is a prey.

Leisure due to excess of food and immobility for the fear of life perhaps induced the attribute of sleep among humans. But the waking gene is still active. You might have gotten out of your slumber feeling very hungry or thirsty. Nature calls are the most frequent reason for coming out of slumber. These wake-ups are physical necessity-induced.

You also get up if someone calls out for you. Or, some rumbling is happening in the surrounding. The waking gene gives power to the brain to identify threat and induce fear in the sleeping person making her come out of slumber and run for life.

It is fear for life that causes a sleeping person wake up even at the slightest of rumblings. If a person is sure of the surrounding sounds - for example sleeping in the room where a power generator is running - she would not get up by its sound. 

A child usually doesn't get up hearing the pressure whistle of the cooker but she would get up if you turn the pages of a newspaper. She is used to that sound of pressure whistle as it reaches her while she stays in the womb but the other sound does not.

Fear, food and defecation wake you up naturally. Rest civilisational wake-ups.

Human brain is considered most productive. It is supposed to be the only living entity that produces and works for producing things that the body can't consume. Brain being brain, it put the act of sleeping to work. Information is key. Brain needs information. Because brain is a problem-solving machine. It is designed to solve problems, seek answers to questions, unravel puzzles.

For all these functions, brain needs information, stored. Power storage of information was difficult or inefficient in purely consumptive phase. It was not required. New problems were slow at coming. But as non-consumptive phase began, volume of problems, situations swelled. 

A better repository of information was required. Brain put its sleep to use. Information was recycled during sleep. Brain became the other kidney. Unnecessary information was filtered out. Necessary ones were stored. This arrangement allowed humans to improve with every single sleep.

Sleeping still improves us. It has now become a bigger necessity than ever. We don't receive information any more. We live in information. Information is drowning us. Information is suffocating us. Information is killing us. Sleep can save us. Sleep should be given a chance. Sleep should not be adulterated. Sleep purification is required for survival of humans and to prevent them from becoming a colony of man-made machines.