Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams. Paul Martin

sights, hear strange sounds and think strange thoughts. As our wakefulness fluctuates, we may wake up again and consciously remember the strange things we have briefly been dreaming. This hypnagogic nonsense sometimes includes bizarre, invented words. The sleep researcher Ian Oswald recalled waking from one hypnagogic dream with the phrase ‘or squawns of medication allow me to ungather’ running through his mind. On another occasion he found himself musing on the hypnagogic thought that ‘it’s rather indoctrinecal’. A British magazine once printed a collection of hypnagogic ramblings sent in by readers. These included the immortal verse ‘Only God and Henry Ford have no umbilical cord.’

      Hypnagogic thoughts and images can be more coherent, however. Charles Dickens often fell into a half-sleeping state while on one of his long nocturnal walks, and he could compose poetry while in this reverie. Dickens wrote of how, one night, he got out of bed at two in the morning and walked thirty miles into the countryside:

      I fell asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly … It is a curiosity of broken sleep that I made immense quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course I never make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke a certain language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have nearly forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phenomena I have such frequent experience in the state between sleeping and waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know I cannot be awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready.

      People who play lots of computer games sometimes experience ‘screen dreams’ as they fall asleep, in which they see vivid images of the game they have been playing. These screen dreams are also products of the hypnagogic state. The computer game Tetris, which requires the player to fit together coloured shapes as they cascade down the screen, is well known for provoking hypnagogic dreams. Scientists at Harvard Medical School investigated screen dreams by getting volunteers to play Tetris for several hours. Many of them experienced vivid dreams about Tetris as they fell asleep. Among the subjects in this experiment were five amnesiac patients who had extensive brain damage in their temporal medial lobes – brain regions crucial for conscious memory. Three of the five amnesiacs experienced hypnagogic dreams of Tetris even though they had no conscious memory of playing the game. This implies that the brain can generate hypnagogic dreams without input from conscious memory.

      The length of time it takes you to fall asleep, once you have lain down and shut your eyes, is known as your sleep latency. It varies according to lots of factors. As we saw earlier, very short sleep latencies usually indicate sleep deprivation, whereas very long sleep latencies may signify other problems. A study of people living in rural Oxfordshire found that those with the longest sleep latencies typically described themselves as bored or mildly ill. You can make yourself fall asleep faster if you are minded to do so. Researchers proved this by giving volunteers a financial incentive to fall asleep quickly at various times during the day. The paid volunteers fell asleep faster than subjects who had no financial incentive.

      Your body temperature has a big influence on how fast you fall asleep. A night’s sleep is normally preceded by a drop in core body temperature, and scientists have established that this drop in temperature actively facilitates the onset of sleep. Under normal conditions, the maximum rate of decrease in body temperature occurs about one hour before the onset of sleep. If the onset of sleep is artificially delayed, the drop in body temperature is attenuated – further evidence that the two are closely linked. The polymath Benjamin Franklin realised the importance of a falling body temperature in triggering sleep. He set out this practical advice in a 1786 essay called ‘The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams’:

      Get out of bed, beat up and turn your pillow, shake the bedclothes well with at least twenty shakes, then throw the bed open and leave it to cool; in the meanwhile, continuing undressed, walk about your chamber. When you begin to feel the cold air unpleasant, then return to your bed, and you will soon fall asleep, and your sleep will be sweet and pleasant.

      Benjamin Disraeli found that he was more comfortable when sleeping in hot weather if he used two beds, moving periodically from the hot, sweaty bed into the cooler one. Benjamin Franklin lit upon the same trick years earlier, but Franklin reckoned he needed four beds to be really cool. William Harvey, the seventeenth-century English physician who discovered the circulation of blood, similarly appreciated that cooling the body helps to induce sleep. According to his contemporary, the biographer John Aubrey, Harvey would tackle his insomnia by cooling himself down until he began to shiver:

      He was hot-headed, and his thoughts working would many times keep him from sleeping. He told me that then his way was to rise out of his Bed, and walk about his Chamber in his Shirt, till he was pretty cool, i.e. till he began to have a horror [began to shiver], and then return to bed, and sleep very comfortably.

      Another scholar who stumbled across the sleep-inducing properties of cool air was Lord Monboddo, an eccentric eighteenth-century Scottish nobleman and pioneering anthropologist. When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited Monboddo, the great sage and his biographer were surprised by their host’s behaviour. As Boswell recorded:

      Lord Monboddo told me he awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called taking an air bath; after which he went to bed again, and slept two hours more. Johnson, who was always ready to beat down any thing that seemed to be exhibited with disproportionate importance, thus observed: ‘I suppose, Sir, there is no more in it than this, he awakes at four, and cannot sleep till he chills himself, and makes the warmth of the bed a grateful sensation.’

      A less irksome way of achieving a similar effect is to take a hot bath an hour or two before bedtime. The bath will temporarily raise your body temperature. Over the following hours, your temperature will drop again and, all being well, this will help to trigger sleep. Experiments have confirmed that people do feel sleepier at bedtime after taking a hot bath. But the bath must not be too hot, too long or too close to bedtime, or it may have the reverse effect.

      The fall in core body temperature that precedes sleep is accompanied by a small rise in the temperature of the hands, feet and other appendages. Blood vessels in your appendages dilate when you lie down to sleep at night, causing them to warm up. As they warm up so your body cools down, helping to send you off to sleep. Experiments have shown that warm feet assist the onset of sleep, bearing out another piece of folk wisdom. One of the best ways of predicting how quickly someone will fall asleep is to measure the temperature gradient across their body. The hands and feet are normally a degree or two cooler than core body temperature, but the temperature difference dwindles to nothing as sleep approaches.

      A further demonstration of the linkage between warm appendages and the onset of sleep came from a study of people suffering from a disorder known as vasospastic syndrome. This condition is caused by faults in the physiological mechanisms controlling the peripheral blood vessels, which become less able to dilate. One of the main symptoms is cold hands and feet. As predicted, the cold-toed victims of vasospastic syndrome took longer than normal to fall asleep at night.

      The importance of a declining body temperature means that artificial heat sources like electric blankets can disturb sleep. An electric blanket operating between the early hours of the morning and waking will typically increase your core body temperature by about 0.2 degrees Celsius. Even this small increase in body temperature is enough to disrupt sleep.

      The sleep-inducing effect of a falling body temperature helps to explain why vigorous physical exercise, which raises body temperature, is not a good idea just before going to bed. It also reminds us why it is inadvisable to eat a large meal shortly before bedtime. The digestive processes that follow a large meal evoke a rise in metabolic rate, which in turn raises body temperature. In an ideal world, a large evening meal would be eaten at least three hours before bedtime. However, this helpful advice is of little use to the many people who work long hours and face long journeys to get home afterwards. They may have barely enough time to prepare and eat an evening meal before going to bed – another example of how lifestyles can conflict with good sleep.

      One popular notion that reportedly fails to stand up to scientific scrutiny