There’s a great little article in last week’s New York Times, Down For The Count which overviews recent scientific research on sleep.

“Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don’t know what sleep is.”

(Appropriately Wikipedia has already absorbed data from this NYT article into it’s own entry on sleep. )

It seems fitting that in today’s rushed and hectic world, scientists ponder what sleep is or why sleep even exists. The troubling thing about it for me is the looming insinuation that our slumberland is prime real estate. It’s time when we could be doing something useful, like filling it full of important tasks, like shopping.

Don’t get me wrong, I have often fantasized about having more time to myself at night, enviously inspired by tales of remarkable humans like Rudolf Steiner, a prolific thinker and writer who is said to have slept only 2 or 3 hours every night. He too thought and wrote a lot about sleep (this book, this lecture).

Some interpretations of classical Indian cosmology consider the three Gunas as the three domains of consciouness: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Earth or Mars, if you’re awake, you in the waking world.

But the most interesting thing that I learned from this wave of research deals with the sleeping patterns of water mammals like dolphins, who literally swim between the worlds by sleeping with only half their brain at any given time. I find this fascinating when considering the liminal and the hypnogogic. Bridging the waking world and the dreaming world also interested the late physician and psychoanalyst, John C. Lilly, who developed the isolation tank based upon his studies of dolphins.