Adele Ferguson - "No one really knows why people need sleep"

THERE’S BEEN another one of those sleep studies warning us once again that millions of Americans are sleep-deprived, thus making us vulnerable to heart attacks and strokes, dumbed down students and drowsy drivers.

The latest is according to a study presented at the American Academy of Sleep’s annual meeting in June in Minneapolis and reported in USA Today last month.

It shouldn’t surprise you to be told that men tend to be night owls, wanting to go to bed later and get up later, while women are more often morning people. I happen to be a morning person. I’m up, well, awake at 5 a.m. seven days a week, and I’ve been that way long before I read Einstein’s quote that the people who get things done in the world all get up around five in the morning.

I don’t know how much sleep he got, but I doubt it was the seven to eight hours recommended by the National Sleep Foundation, Columbia University Medical Center, National Institutes of Health, Northwest Memorial Hospital Sleep Disorder Center, Brown University’s Bradley Hospital Sleep Lab and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. I’m lucky if I get five hours.

I KEEP FILES on sleep, mostly because of periodic attempts to allow students to sleep in in the mornings and stay up late at nights. I don’t know how many schools will be adjusting their schedules with the time to “fall back” a month or so away..

I have never believed the so called sleep experts that teens can’t learn unless they are allowed to sleep in and go to school around 9 a.m. The problem, I feel, lies with parents who don’t make their kids go to bed at a reasonable hour. Today’s teens don’t do enough work to get tired enough to go to sleep at 9 or 10 o’clock. They stay out late, play video games, watch TV, anything except work that would make them tired.

According to this latest study, women may be better able to cope with sleep deprivation than men, probably because they get more deep sleep. They sack out when they hit the bed and are in Dreamland in 9.3 mins. Men take 23.2 minutes on average to fall asleep. It is not suggested or even mentioned that the difference results after she says she has a headache and he mulls over whether he can talk her out of it or not.

Though they fall asleep quicker, women are more likely to have insomnia. They wake after a few hours and can’t get back to sleep. More men than women have sleep apnea where they stop breathing for several seconds, waking up snoring and gasping for air. Untreated, apnea is linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

I’M AN INSOMNIAC. I go to sleep before 10, frequently during Masterpiece Mysteries on TV where I often miss murders and rarely am awake for the last five minutes so I never know who did them anyway. Sleepless, I recite the capitals of the states, as many counties as I can name, the names of the Magnificent Seven, the seven dwarfs.

I often have nightmares, strange dreams. My husband has been dead since 2005 and he rarely shows up in my dreams but one night he did and I greeted him with “Where have you been all this time?” He said, “Poison.”

During my wakeful hours, there had been a program on TV that had to do with poison and I had been about half awake throughout. H.G. Welles, in his “Journey to the Center of the Earth” had a villain in it who called sleep “little slices of death.” While the others on the journey were sleeping on a beach, he killed and ate the pet duck that had accompanied them. I think a T.Rex ate him. The last word.

No expert knows why all people regardless of job or life style, hobo or athlete, need seven or eight hours of sleep. One of the mysteries of the ages.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)