We all sleep through the night and hopefully most of us wake up refreshed. When we look back to yesterday, suddenly all those worries seem to have an answer or at least worry us a little less. While you slept, your brain helped put certain connections together and helped come up with some solutions that you might not have thought of.
I haven’t done any research for this, so this is all from my memory, but some really famous people in history used the power of sleep to increase productivity and find unknown answers to certain questions. Thomas Edison and if I’m not mistaken Ben Franklin were guilty of taking many naps throughout the day, because they knew how much it would help them immediately.
A study was conducted in which two groups of people were taught information and their recall of the information was tested several hours later. The only difference is that one of the groups was able to take a nap between learning and testing. The results; The napping group scored TEN TIMES higher than the other group. 10 times. That result is gigantic, and it only further supports the evidence that napping can help you.
So there are five stages of sleep. Suddenly I don’t really remember them, but the one that stands out is REM sleep. This stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and it is the time when your brain enters the sleep state. For your naps to help you, you need to enter the REM State. In the test above, all the participants who took a nap entered the REM state, and that’s the key to making the time you spend napping valuable.
So the next time you feel like taking a nap, don’t call yourself lazy, rather call it a productive investment of time. Just make sure you have a dream while you sleep, and it will all be worth it.
Since this article is a bit short, I am going to digress on 2 more things that you should definitely look into. The first is Lucid Dreaming. Have you ever wanted to fly, walk through walls, move things with your mind, hang out with celebrities, or basically do anything else you can think of? Now, have you ever been in a dream when you knew you were dreaming? If you have a good one, it’s part of the way there, but if you don’t, there are some easy steps you can take.
Always be on the lookout for something that doesn’t obey the laws of gravity or some weird situation that wouldn’t make sense in the real world. There was only one episode of American Dad where the son knew he was lucid dreaming because of a red ball he was bouncing. Feel free to check that too. When I was in college, I took a lot of random classes, one of them was “States of Consciousness.” This class was very interesting mainly due to the fact that we learned all about strange mental states caused by drugs, lack of sleep and many more interesting topics. We also cover lucid dreams.
The teacher was probably the closest I’ve ever come to a real-life “hippie,” but he was still a fantastic guy. He taught us to draw a large letter on the palm of the hand and to constantly look at the hand many times during the day. When you see the letter, ask yourself if this is a dream. By doing this many times, if you look at your hands when you are actually in a dream, you will automatically know that you are dreaming. It doesn’t matter if the letter is there or not, because after the repetition you will be used to wondering if you are in a dream.
The first time you meet in a dream, rub your hands together while looking at them. From this point on, it is easy to wake up or fall back into unconscious sleep. By rubbing your hands together, you will be able to keep reminding yourself where you are and you will be able to stay in the lucid state longer.
Now for the Second Rampage, this one will be a little bit shorter and it goes perfectly well with the theme of the dream. I looked up what it was called, but couldn’t find it anywhere. It is something like “somnambulistic state (perhaps hypno…)”. Although when I write that, it comes up sleepwalking. Some famous inventors also used this technique. We’ll call it the “SPOON” Technique.
When you ever fall asleep at night, do you ever get crazy ideas or hallucinate right before you actually fall asleep? This is the state you aspire to. I remember when I would fall into this state and then get pushed all of a sudden, I was talking about the most random things ever. Anything from fighter jets to farm animals, but sometimes crazy business ideas that seemed to work.
How do you get this state to work for you? This is where the spoon comes in. When you’re asleep, you have no control over your muscles, and that goes away right after the “state” is over. To wake up just as you are about to cross, it is recommended that you hold a spoon vertically in your hand between your thumb and forefinger while your arm rests at your side. This way, when his muscles give out, he will drop the spoon and it will fall to the ground, ideally waking him up.
When you wake up, you’ll still have all those ideas in your mind, and you’ll just have a pen and paper ready to record them for further thought.
I know this article rambled on to a few different things, but I promise there is some good information out there. So good luck trying everything, and let me know in the comments below how it all worked out. Thanks.