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

All week I've not been sleeping well. I spoke to someone this morning who says they've had trouble sleeping too.

Then someone else piped up and said it was because its a full moon.

Is there any truth to this? Am I turning into a werewolf?

That lamp post looks appealing

It's more likely that you've just got a lot of things on your mind. Saying that though, if the moon can affect the tides it must have some affect on people considering how much of the human body is made of water.

I thought it was a bit of an old wives tales, but it just made me think because someone else said they were having trouble kipping too.

Actually the moon was terribly bright last night. It wouldn't surprise me if it was just about bright enough to confuse the brain to think that it was daylight.

Well I didnt sleep well last night...

Ne neither, there was too much blood in my alcohol system last night I'll sleep well tonight though

We've finally put some curtains up in our bedroom, two years after movning in, and we are both sleeping better - although finding it harder to get up in the mornings!

It has also been a lot colder the past few nights, you might need an extra blanket to stop you waking up cold.

k

I keep reading this as
"Full moon affecting sheep" and wondering exactly what effects poor flossie is suffering from.

Must be all the werewolves that have suddenly sprung up

I'm having big sleep problems this week too - keep waking up after an hour, unable to get back to sleep again.

Perhaps the full-moon is responsible - but Mercury is also retrograde at the moment.

I didn't sleep well last night either.

Perhaps H2 is mainly peopled by insomniacs.

Mol

Odd, I only got about 2 hours sleep last night. Spent today like a zombie! I don't think any of my colleagues noticed.

Anybody fancy starting a society? The HooToo Full Moon Insomniac Support Group. We can have full moon meets in 24 hour supermarkets.

Nah, it'll never work. No acronym.

I didn't sleep at all well last night either.

When I *did* I was dreaming of tiny creatures crawling around in my skin and bursting out at odd moments. Could have been something to do with Hellraiser though.......

I fell asleep for half an hour earlier and taken the edge off tonights sleep. Ah well, I started watching Father Ted last night, should finish series two tonight

I slept like a baby last night.

What a stupid expression. I didn't wake up at ridiculous hours and start wailing my head off until someone stuck a bottle of milk in my gob.

I slept really well last night, is what I meant to say. I anticipate doing the same tonight. Waking up, that's another matter...

RF

Because I hate to see a perfectly good discussion fade away without exploring all the options, I'm going to suggest that prayer or the absence of prayer may be somehow connected.

Sleep is one of the first human activities to arouse curiosity in a child's mind. We become aware of it early on, perhaps because we are told to go do it on a daily basis in a very arbitrary way by our adult minders with seemingly no regard to our actual needs or desires in this regard.

In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream we hear Bottom declare that he feels 'an expedition of sleep hath come upon' him. But we more mortal characters are not allowed to drift and dream at will. Instead we are trained to a routine of nightly rest from a very early age.

Bedtime stories and nightly prayers seem to have long been ritualised into this daily activity and most of us will have heard these words often:

"Now I lay me down to sleep
and pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul will take."

Now, I for one have always wondered how anyone could sleep after acknowledging the possibility that some Lord might well take you after you've drifted off. No doubt, those who toss and turn are at least subconsciously aware that sleep offers little or no protection from intruders such as tooth fairies, Lords and other things going bump in the night.


~jwf~

Ye-es ... but it's not my subconscious keeping me awake. That would be (I would argue) what wakes me up in the middle of the night (my subconscious thoughts, I mean, because that's when they are busy doing their thang). My problem is generally dropping off in the first place, and *that* happens because my conscious thoughts won't shut up.

And actually that happens irrespective of the phase of the moon. It's probably just a coincidence this week. But of some comfort to know I wasn't the only one!

RF, when I was a baby, I apparently routinely slept for 13 hours a night from the age of two weeks. Sadly not a talent inherited by any of my children.

Mol

The tidal effect of the full moon is minuscule. It has an effect on the water of the world, because it's spread over huge distances. At human scale, the difference between the tidal force at full moon and half moon is millions of times less than the gravity caused by putting a teddy beside your bed. So whatever this effect is, it's nothing to do with tides.

It could be the light from the moon or it could be the psychological effects from readding stories about werewolves. Or it could be just coincidence.

>> It could be the light from the moon or... <<

Aha!
So..., because you can see moonrays, you believe that light "might" have some influence. While it is certainly highly recognised by romantics and composers of Sonatae, we should not always believe our eyes.

We should not simply dismiss the power of those other moonrays that cannot be seen. Just because most electromagnetic forces are indsicernible to the spectral range of the human eye does not mean they aren't there.

I venture to say that the invisible moonrays are the more potent. And I offer two poor analogies: radio waves influence more people than simple sound waves can; and, TV has greater power than any real life influences.

~jwf~