h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's what time I've woken up every morning this week. Probably. I have no idea exactly what time - it might be even earlier because when I wake up before the alarm goes off at 7.00 I don't look at the clock. But I do know that whatever time it is that I've been waking up, it's before sunrise, or even twilight. Sunrise this week has been around 6.30am and twilight begins some time between 5.30 and 6.00, and it feels like I'm tossing and turning for an hour before I see daylight starting to come through the blinds.

I did actually manage to get back to sleep on one morning

There's little point in going to bed earlier (usually around midnight, and I might read for 30 minutes) - I'll just wake up earlier It's getting to be rather annoying.

Incidentally, according to the website I used to find out the time of sunrise in Austin, there is no official night-time in London right now - only astronomical twilight. I had no idea http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/uk/london

Sleeping poorly seems to be part of aging. As to exact timing, for some peculiar reason I often wake up and look at the clock at 4:44. Over and over. 4:44 precisely. How's that for a weird body clock?

Good job there's only 60 minutes in an hour - 6.66 would be

I know that we need less sleep as we get older. I used to know a retired couple whose morning routine was to wake up around 5am, the husband would go downstairs and make a cuppa, which they'd drink in bed, and then get up around 6.30am (I didn't press them on what they did in the time between finishing their tea and getting out of bed ).

On the other hand, though, they were the kind of early-to-bed, early-to-rise people who would have gone to bed around 10pm, certainly by 11, so they were still getting six hours sleep a night, which is more than I'm getting, and feeling it.

Yeah, six a night consistently would be wonderful.

Okay, here's a question for you that may sound frivolous but Is asked in all seriousness. When calculating how much sleep you actually get, do you include that hour in the evening in the recliner before you go to bed? Does the six hours have to be a solid six?

It's true that I do sometimes fall asleep on the sofa in the evening, if I've had more than a few ales That hasn't happened this past week though, but when it does and I find that I've been asleep for a couple of hours and it's 1am, it'll often take me another two or three hours to get back to sleep, so I might get an hour or two on the sofa and then another three in bed.

There is this supposedly newly rediscovered idea of two sleeps, which its proponents say is how we used to do it before the advent of artificial lighting, or at least artificial lighting stronger than a candle or a tallow lamp, and that going to bed and having a solid 7-8 hours in one hit is, if not unnatural, certainly a relatively new sleep pattern for humans.

I don't know if it's true or not, although there's supposed to be good evidence for it, and Samuel Pepys (I think) mentions it in his famous diary. I know someone who went downstairs once in the small hours and found his dad eating a cheese and onion sandwich, and it turned out that this was a regular nightly routine for his old man - waking up around 2am and making himself a sandwich before going back to bed

That's how it works for me, too. Fall asleep in the living room, get up, go to bed, then lie awake for ages before going back to sleep. It's frustrating.

The *AHEM* experts say that if that happens you should do something restful, like reading a book, and avoid things like watching television, getting on the web, playing a video game, working on your accounts, cleaning the kitchen. But if you know you're going to be awake for the next two or three hours anyway, what difference does it make what you do? I've tried the reading thing and got through half a 300-page novel before dropping off.

And I definitely recommend avoiding the radio in the small hours if your local NPR station broadcasts the BBC World Service through the night. The last thing I need when I'm trying to doze off is heaaring about world current affairs, and shouty BBC presenters asking stupid questions and interrupting their interviewee in the middle of every answer

I can confirm it does fail to get properly dark in London at this time of year.
There is always a bit of light in the North West / North East, but not like Glasgow and further north where you can easily read the paper outside at any time of the night.

Yep. I can attest to that. It never got really dark in Edinburgh. And it didn't even get rather dark until nearly 10PM. The so called "magic hour" lasted an actual hour or so which was nice for photography.

I can't agree that it doesn't get properly dark in London, even in June. After nearly nearly 14 years of driving around the city and its suburbs three nights a week I've seen enough night-times to be able to say that. Officially it might only be astronomical twilight but to the average punter it's night, and it looks it, at least for a few hours. But it is very depressing to see the sky starting lighten in the east around 2.30am when you know you've got another four hours to work, then get home, and the sun will be well and truly up at least two hours before you go to bed.

Glasgow and Edinburgh though, that's another matter. I did a run up to Glasgow once, which must have been around this time of the year I reckon, because it was still broad daylight when we arrived, around 9pm, and by the time I started back for London, at about 11.00, it was still barely twilight. It took me until 6am to get back to London, and was well and truly dark when I stopped off at the old Blue Boar (as was), aka Watford Gap, for a cuppa.

Those long twilights you get once you find yourself above 50° north (or south) are one of the few things I really miss about Blighty.

By the way, one important factor I completely forgot to mention, and which I was reminded of because it happened again this morning (6am, thankfully) is that I always wake up in the middle of a dream.

I don't think I would like having 24 hours of daylight. And I'm positive I wouldn't like 24 hours of darkness in the winter. I suppose you can get used to anything. It starts getting dark here around 9-9:30.

If it's a good dream, then rats. If dull or downright bad, be glad you wake up. Even my dreams are boring these days.

Lately, I'm waking up several times/night in the middle of dreams. Usually though I can tell I'm waking up because a previously pleasant or interesting dream gets stuck as I try to assert control on it. I'll not be able to orient myself and find the place I'm trying to get to, or obstacles keep getting in my way, or it will just start turning really, really dark and I'll wake up before it gets any worse, have a sip of water and try to clear my mind and get back to sleep.

I must say though that I'm getting better at clearing my mind through a simple meditation technique of concentrating on my breathing pattern and imagine it clearing all thoughts from my head. I've finally given myself permission to turn off the constant chatter.

In keep saying I'm going to enroll in TM, but I don't get around to doing it. I'm glad you've found something that works for you. The thing I most need to do is retire so I don't have a hundred and one problems to wade through in my mind all the time.

It's true that I do have a few things weighing on my mind at the moment which could be contributing to disturbed sleep, but I've never been much good at sleeping. It usually takes me a while to fall asleep, and I'm a very light sleeper. This waking up early thing has been going on for a good few years now, but just recently iy's got particularly bad.

I can't help feeling that even if I won or inherited or somehow acquired enough money to see me through to the end of my life so that I could quit work and never have to worry about paying the bills, and indulge myself, I'd still not sleep well.

I've tried TM a few times. I did it quite a lot in my late teens/early twenties and always found it hard to stop my mind wandering. Perhaps I should have stuck at it.

I broke my rule about not looking at the clock when I woke up this morning. After about half an hour of tossing and turning - 5.15am That's about 4½ hours of sleep.

Put the radio on and turned it low (that sometimes sends me back to sleep) - no dice.
Turned it off and tried to sleep - no dice.
Turned it back on - fell asleep and woke up again at 8.30

I hate it when happens.

I awoke at 2:51. That's usual.

Then the next time I woke AND looked at the clock it was 4:19, less than 1 hour before alarm goes off. Then after what felt like only 10 minutes the world's most effective alarm sounded... cat hacking up a hairball at the foot of the bed! Apparently I did drift off again after 4:19 because it was actually 5:09, not 4:30.

Vomiting pet > alarm clock.

four and a half hours sleep is bad.... certianly for me; the consequences of it recently, were utter failure for 'thinking', and concentration, and lack of spatial awareness to the point that I was indangering myself... more than useual

Personally, I think its less about the amoutn of sleep, than the quality; I think this ties in with the idea bout the differnt brainwave patturns one gets into at differnt stages of sleep; Of course you still need sufficient time, totall, sleeping, as the quality of the sleep is effectively (I seem to recall), based on the amount of times you cycle through, and into whatever the brainwaves are, that corospoind to deep sleep, which is the restorative bit o the sleep process

The idea behind not doing things like listening/wathing TV, things on the computer, or complicated taslks, is that you don't want to cycle your brain waves, totally away from the ones more associated to sleep, to the ones assocaited with wakefullness, when its at a point in time, you wanna go back to bed and try sleep; as it will take longer to cycle back into the brain waves associated with the deeper sleep... I think

There can be some err, odd side effects of poor sleep too, on just about any bit of physiology; one of the things I noticed when I started taking the melatonin, the first time, was how I found I didn't need to moisturise as much/often and... err... gastrointestinal changes/improvements associated with 'better quality' (and probably longer too), sleep

The changing patturns of daylight/dusk/sunrise, like at the moment, is probably really messing up the resetting daily of the serkadian clock (body clock), which is naturally normally reset, each and every day to be 24 hours long (the non-reset internal serkadian rythem rarely runs precisely 24 hours, instead being over, or under ; hence my sleep without the melatonin, daily, seems to make my body hwork on a differnt time zone, each and every day, with 2 or more hours of trying* to sleep, on getting into bed, no matter how tired I am... and often then early waking to be even more tired than I was before 'bed'...)

Mind. in some ways, I'm probably more dangerous when I can sleep I'm sure street lighting, little constant lights on in the house/flat, etc., help mess up everyones serkadian clocks, to a greater or lesser extent (the little bit of lights oming from all the digital displays, etc, plus street lighting coming in, through the curtains etc)