A Life without Sleep

What does it mean to be human, beyond the fact that we our conscious of our own intuition? Perhaps it is that we still are bound by instinctive needs to feed ourselves, water ourselves, and, of course, do business when nature calls. Although we can these needs can be satisfied within a matter of minutes, there is still another requirement our body has for survival that takes hours at a time to satisfy. And what am I referring to here? Sleep. That’s right, sleep. We all know that we must rest and get about eight to nine hours per day to revive ourselves fully in this field, but why do we need to sleep, anyhow?

It is obvious that we need sleep from time to time. It is however not so obvious for why we need sleep. However still, the answers are quite simple: we need it to relax our bodies from the daily stresses that are put upon it. I’m not just talking about rejuvenating muscles, however. I am also talking about the brain. It must be allotted adequate sleeping time so that it can do things like organize memories from the past day. It also does things like make new connections between different neurons, so that entirely new thoughts can be made. These things especially happen in a higher magnitude when we go through Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep – you know, the kind of sleep where dreams are lucid and because of so can be remembered hours after waking up. These processes are so integral to the body’s health that, in fact, that going without sleep would cause chaos from our toes to the tip of our heads.

To help assert what I mean, let me give a little description of what would happen to you if you get no sleep over a period of time. For the first day, your muscles will probably ache all over and you will, of course, feel exhausted all the time, and you’ll probably also notice that you don’t have the aptitude to do anything at all or correctly for the day. On the second day, you’ll be in an even worse state. By the third day, you’ll start hallucinating and your speech will start to slur, and by either the fourth or fifth day, your brain will basically force you to shut down into a coma-like state for days on end. I know this so because one of my friends once was awake for four days straight, and she reported that she had slept for two days straight after the event. With all of this said, it is obvious that our bodies need consistent sleep for the best performance. But what if our bodies could do these sorts of fixes and improvements that normally occur during sleep while we’re awake? What if we didn’t need to sleep at all, ever?

If such a thing was so, I can foresee a whole range of things that would be different in our lifestyles. Some of the more simple things in life, like being late for work or needing caffeine, would be nearly a thing of the past. But that lack of need for sleep would also bring many more drastic changes to our lifestyles as well. We could work and play for a much longer time of day… a full 24 hours! Our schedules would, as a result, need be reworked greatly! There would be so many things that we would no longer miss out on as well, like seeing changes in a particular landscape across the day and night. However, I could also see ourselves getting bored with the world around us, as we would no longer have dreams to visit. But even that could be compensated by ever-improving computer simulations. In fact, now that I think about it, those simulations would be improving at an even faster rate due to our insomniac lifestyles. Let me explain…

You see, in an insomniac world, people would no longer be “distracted” by something as lengthy as sleep. They would be able to continue work as long as they please, and be much less probable to forget about, say, the details of an innovative design that came out during their work. They would be able to accomplish much more in a lesser extension of time. And from that, human advancement itself would be widely accelerated. Let’s also not forget that stuff like schooling would be a lot quicker, based on the fact that the school days could run almost back-to-back during a workweek. Just imagine. What other things would come about if people were a lot like New York; being that they would never sleep?