In Search of Morpheus

[Moon Glade]

I have trouble sleeping. My mind can't stop. So I think about dumb things. Past regrets I try and shove away with thoughts of past travels. Places I've been. Places I want to return to. Places I want to go for the first time..

Last night I quickly figured out how we arrived at 365 days in a year by creating an imaginary person counting the sunrises over a place on the horizon day-after-day until the sunrise was in that exact spot 365 days later. Easy enough. A year takes 365 days. Prehistoric places like Stonehenge and Ile Gavrinis were nothing more than giant clocks to record solstices. Probably the winter solstice was the most important because on that day the sun would start coming back and that meant warmer caves, plants growing again and less hunger.

Those thoughts brought back memories of many of the prehistoric sites I have visited and how I marveled over our ingenuity so many years before telescopes, libraries or Google. And then my sleepless mind asked, "Yes, but how did they come up with the 24 hour day? Certain that it must have something to do with sundials as the earliest clocks but why not a ten hour day with each hour consisting of 160 minutes? Then my sleepless mind asked why is an hour 60 minutes?

Prior to falling asleep I asked myself why is there 360 degrees in a circle and does that have something to do with time?

This morning I could not thank Google enough. Amazing how smart we were so many years ago and amazing how it was such a lucky accident in regard to marine navigation with the use of time. Then I tried to remember what that device for marine navigation was called and finally in the shower this morning it came to me Sextant! So much is based on the number 60 that prior to this I never gave any thought to.

 

[butters]

yes, google is your friend (most the time)

 

[Nightspeed]

The Sumerians created the 24-hour day and the 60-minute hour, if I recall. Very inventive, those Sumerians. Inventing writing and a way to tell time some 5,000 years ago or so.

Of course, the drawback to their inventing timekeeping means that I'm painfully aware of the hours and then nights I spend unable to sleep. I have periodic insomnia, not really triggered by my emotions, or at least no one's been able to find a connection. Every month to month and a half I will go through three to five nights of one or two hours of sleep at most and none for the greatest part. The only thing that makes me finally sleep is when I collapse out of sheer exhaustion. Oh, and by the third day I begin to have minor visual hallucinations. Nothing scary but damned distracting.

 

[Moon Glade]

The Sumerians created the 24-hour day and the 60-minute hour, if I recall. Very inventive, those Sumerians. Inventing writing and a way to tell time some 5,000 years ago or so.

Of course, the drawback to their inventing timekeeping means that I'm painfully aware of the hours and then nights I spend unable to sleep. I have periodic insomnia, not really triggered by my emotions, or at least no one's been able to find a connection. Every month to month and a half I will go through three to five nights of one or two hours of sleep at most and none for the greatest part. The only thing that makes me finally sleep is when I collapse out of sheer exhaustion. Oh, and by the third day I begin to have minor visual hallucinations. Nothing scary but damned distracting.

I have also had bouts of insomnia that usually lasted about four nights before I would get back to a more normal sleep pattern. Yours sound worse than mine though. Sundials to measure time gives a whole new meaning to 'twilight' time.

Last night's battle in search of sleep:

This time it was rods and cones. My wife wants to repaint the condo. Last week we went by Sherwin Williams and picked up some paint samples. I'm not so excited about it. I'm not completely color blind, just blue-green to some extent. So last night I started thinking about color. I remember reading years ago in a book, I think it was "The Tao of Physics" that color does not actually exist until the rods and cones in our eyes decipher it. Color, according to the author, comes from the way certain surfaces refract light and how our eyes interpret that refraction. I guess that makes sense when you consider that some animals are totally colorblind (unfortunate humans as well).

So I started thinking in terms of black (the total sum of all colors) and white (pure white being the total absence of color) and how the refraction of light off them into our eyes creates them. So do I like strong colors as a means of making up for my deficiency in the blue-green spectrum? And is a totally color blind animal, human or not, seeing the true light not the refracted color of the light of a refracted surface?

All those thoughts and a few others I can't quite remember got me to sleep until I woke up in the middle of the night to pee (an occurrence that happens more-and-more often at this point in my life). Typically when I get up to pee in the middle of the night and I remember what I have been dreaming about I try to cling to that dream when getting back into bed because by doing so I feel I have a better chance of getting back to sleep.

But last night that was not the case because I suddenly realized why we always (and I'm pretty sure this is more-or-less true of all of us) dream in black and white. We dream in images and since those images are in dreams there is no light refracting off of them and hence no color. Problem solved! Now can I get back to sleep?

Or do I have to think about my theory of prehistory pottery thrown on a wheel? Or that melting ice cream cone on a sidewalk in Carmel California that was a catalyst in the life of Clint Eastwood so many years ago? And what about life's catalysts in general? That got me thinking of mine. I think we all have several catalytic moments but most likely are only aware of a few of those turning points in our lives.

All these thoughts churning around in my brain while I hear Clare quietly snoring beside me in deep sleep while I grow more frantic trying to get back to sleep.

Am I losing my mind? And then it comes to me! That's what sleeps about. Losing your mind. Not thinking about anything, at least not in a sane rational manner.

And finally I slipped away and my mind was at rest.

 

[Nightspeed]

I have also had bouts of insomnia that usually lasted about four nights before I would get back to a more normal sleep pattern. Yours sound worse than mine though. Sundials to measure time gives a whole new meaning to 'twilight' time.

Last night's battle in search of sleep:

This time it was rods and cones. My wife wants to repaint the condo. Last week we went by Sherwin Williams and picked up some paint samples. I'm not so excited about it. I'm not completely color blind, just blue-green to some extent. So last night I started thinking about color. I remember reading years ago in a book, I think it was "The Tao of Physics" that color does not actually exist until the rods and cones in our eyes decipher it. Color, according to the author, comes from the way certain surfaces refract light and how our eyes interpret that refraction. I guess that makes sense when you consider that some animals are totally colorblind (unfortunate humans as well).

So I started thinking in terms of black (the total sum of all colors) and white (pure white being the total absence of color) and how the refraction of light off them into our eyes creates them. So do I like strong colors as a means of making up for my deficiency in the blue-green spectrum? And is a totally color blind animal, human or not, seeing the true light not the refracted color of the light of a refracted surface?

All those thoughts and a few others I can't quite remember got me to sleep until I woke up in the middle of the night to pee (an occurrence that happens more-and-more often at this point in my life). Typically when I get up to pee in the middle of the night and I remember what I have been dreaming about I try to cling to that dream when getting back into bed because by doing so I feel I have a better chance of getting back to sleep.

But last night that was not the case because I suddenly realized why we always (and I'm pretty sure this is more-or-less true of all of us) dream in black and white. We dream in images and since those images are in dreams there is no light refracting off of them and hence no color. Problem solved! Now can I get back to sleep?

Or do I have to think about my theory of prehistory pottery thrown on a wheel? Or that melting ice cream cone on a sidewalk in Carmel California that was a catalyst in the life of Clint Eastwood so many years ago? And what about life's catalysts in general? That got me thinking of mine. I think we all have several catalytic moments but most likely are only aware of a few of those turning points in our lives.

All these thoughts churning around in my brain while I hear Clare quietly snoring beside me in deep sleep while I grow more frantic trying to get back to sleep.

Am I losing my mind? And then it comes to me! That's what sleeps about. Losing your mind. Not thinking about anything, at least not in a sane rational manner.

And finally I slipped away and my mind was at rest.

I learned long ago that we dream in black and white, yet my dreams are always filled with color, from the tiniest refraction on a butterfly's wing to the black jade paint job my 1972 Monte Carlo had. Does our brain assign the colors we remember? I've never really found an answer to that.

I used to lie in bed and think of the most random things, too. I suck at math but for some reason I'll start doing prime numbers right out of the blue. I compose blog posts that I'll probably never write. One night, after a seven-hour session of tracing hominin evolution in my sleeplessness I got up and called a friend and ended up talking about it for two hours with her (still not sure where Homo rudolfensis fits, though).

Over the years I've learned that I have to have some sort of distraction to keep me from thinking so that I can sleep. I found some online streaming channels that play old radio detective serials from the 1930s to the 1960s. I've heard them all hundreds, maybe thousands of times by now in some cases. But they divert my fevered wonderings enough (most of the time, anyway) that I can drift off to sleep.

 

[Moon Glade]

Let me run this by all of you and hope that I am wrong:

After one of my nightly trips to the loo (An English term based on the French for the water) I stumbled back into bed and while trying to put myself back to sleep my mind wandered to Elon Musk and his latest predictions. Prior to this I haven't given any more credence to his predictions about AI than I have to Global Warming since climates always change and technology always advances. But then just prior to dropping off I realized that Elon Musk is right! AI has to wipe out the human race! It's the only answer!

Global warming or if you prefer climate change now seems to be generally accepted as 'the conventional wisdom' and as such that most likely has made its way into the algorithms that make up AI. Therefore if the human race as it expands and develops will continue to contribute the 'problem' of climate change and the only way to stop that, especially since some countries will refuse to do anything about the 'problem' would be to eliminate the human race.

If AI can go through all the climate information since the forming of the earth it could see that climates change and humans adapt but obviously that information cannot be inputted even if the programmers could overcome their biases.

Are we toast?

 

[FGB]

I have trouble sleeping. My mind can't stop. So I think about dumb things. Past regrets I try and shove away with thoughts of past travels. Places I've been. Places I want to return to. Places I want to go for the first time..

Last night I quickly figured out how we arrived at 365 days in a year by creating an imaginary person counting the sunrises over a place on the horizon day-after-day until the sunrise was in that exact spot 365 days later. Easy enough. A year takes 365 days. Prehistoric places like Stonehenge and Ile Gavrinis were nothing more than giant clocks to record solstices. Probably the winter solstice was the most important because on that day the sun would start coming back and that meant warmer caves, plants growing again and less hunger.

Those thoughts brought back memories of many of the prehistoric sites I have visited and how I marveled over our ingenuity so many years before telescopes, libraries or Google. And then my sleepless mind asked, "Yes, but how did they come up with the 24 hour day? Certain that it must have something to do with sundials as the earliest clocks but why not a ten hour day with each hour consisting of 160 minutes? Then my sleepless mind asked why is an hour 60 minutes?

Prior to falling asleep I asked myself why is there 360 degrees in a circle and does that have something to do with time?

This morning I could not thank Google enough. Amazing how smart we were so many years ago and amazing how it was such a lucky accident in regard to marine navigation with the use of time. Then I tried to remember what that device for marine navigation was called and finally in the shower this morning it came to me Sextant! So much is based on the number 60 that prior to this I never gave any thought to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sleep/comments/3y7x0y

I had a real problem with sleeping because of my internal dialog back in 1988.

Took a while to fix it.
Self-Hypnotic relaxation and sleep tape helped... Learning to relax and tensing all muscles and slowly relaxing starting with the toes helped along with working or just doing something to exhaustion.

Xanax helps also!
Good luck!

 

[Skyii]

I have trouble sleeping. My mind can't stop. So I think about dumb things. Past regrets I try and shove away with thoughts of past travels. Places I've been. Places I want to return to. Places I want to go for the first time..

Last night I quickly figured out how we arrived at 365 days in a year by creating an imaginary person counting the sunrises over a place on the horizon day-after-day until the sunrise was in that exact spot 365 days later. Easy enough. A year takes 365 days. Prehistoric places like Stonehenge and Ile Gavrinis were nothing more than giant clocks to record solstices. Probably the winter solstice was the most important because on that day the sun would start coming back and that meant warmer caves, plants growing again and less hunger.

Those thoughts brought back memories of many of the prehistoric sites I have visited and how I marveled over our ingenuity so many years before telescopes, libraries or Google. And then my sleepless mind asked, "Yes, but how did they come up with the 24 hour day? Certain that it must have something to do with sundials as the earliest clocks but why not a ten hour day with each hour consisting of 160 minutes? Then my sleepless mind asked why is an hour 60 minutes?

Prior to falling asleep I asked myself why is there 360 degrees in a circle and does that have something to do with time?

This morning I could not thank Google enough. Amazing how smart we were so many years ago and amazing how it was such a lucky accident in regard to marine navigation with the use of time. Then I tried to remember what that device for marine navigation was called and finally in the shower this morning it came to me Sextant! So much is based on the number 60 that prior to this I never gave any thought to.

Sounds like quite the trip down the rabbit hole but also a great learning one as well.

 

[Moon Glade]

Sounds like quite the trip down the rabbit hole but also a great learning one as well.

"Down the rabbit hole..." That's a good one that Alice gave us, but don't ask Alice.