Falling Asleep to Television

When I was younger, I always thought I was the only one who fell asleep to television. When I was finally old enough to discover the sleep timer on my tv remote, I was thrilled to know there were others. According to a study conducted at the University of Maryland Medical Center, “many people fall asleep with the television on in their room. Watching television before bedtime is often a bad idea. Television is a very engaging medium that tends to keep people up”.

Still, every so often, I’ll be visiting a friend's place or crashing on someone's couch and still be shocked when I learn that they share my nighttime routine; thirty minutes, preferably set to a late night talk show.

The most recent friend to share my sedative said something that stuck with me. “It makes me feel like people are talking to me,” he said. Not the first thing one would associate with sleep, yet there is something oddly comforting about falling asleep to the sound of people, there’s something safe about it. Probably because it reminds us all of younger days in cribs, listening to family continue in the next room. Or maybe that was just my experience. Being Punjabi, often considered the Irish of India, my family has always had that unique quirk of expressing enthusiasm through volume. I’m sure many a young night was spent falling asleep listening to the sound of my father telling a new joke or my mother trying to add her two cents while fighting back chuckles.

Yet most sleep therapists don’t seem to accept my nostalgic views. They advise patients who are having trouble sleeping to “remove all mind-stimulating electronic devices from your bedroom”. Bringing a TV, iPod, or computer into the mix of the bedroom trains the brain to see it as a space for things other than sleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep when you want to.

Falling asleep with the television still on, or other types of auditory stimulations, disrupts REM cycles making it harder to fall into a deeper sleep. Making it harder to dream. I thought about it last weekend and realized I can’t remember the last dream I had. I have a vague sense of when it was, maybe three or so years ago, but I’ve almost completely forgotten about the sensation of dreaming.

This realization depressed me for a while until another friend told me that she’d been trying for months to get rid of her dreams. But she didn’t use the word dreams, she said nightmares instead. She told me about how she hadn’t been able to sleep, for months now, because of the nightmares. After hearing that, I was glad I no longer had dreams. I remembered nightmares again, the complete and utter lack of control you have when you mind takes you through its darker alleys.

But what keeps me excited about the world of dreams is the other extreme, dreams where you have complete control. There’s a scientific term for this, lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are dreams where the sleeper is aware of the fact that they are dreaming. This allows them manipulate their dream environments, literally giving them the ability to create their dream worlds.

Lucid dreaming is such a powerful psychological phenomenon that therapists are using it to fight cases of chronic nightmares. At Ultrecht University in The Netherlands, the Department of Clinical Pyschology took 23 nightmare suffers and treated them with lucid dream therapy. When the study was over their lab report noted, “the nightmare frequency of both treatment groups had decreased,” leading them to conclude that, “Lucid dream therapy seems effective in reducing nightmare frequency, although the primary therapeutic component remains unclear”. These results show that dreams can be a formidable tool in eradicating chronic nightmares and anxiety but even the scientists who performed the study can’t tell us exactly why.

This leads me to ask several questions, starting with, what exactly are dreams? If they have the power to stop insomnia and fight anxiety, what else can they do? We all know dreams hold a significant space in our psyches, but when it comes to articulating this significance, even the scientists seem at a loss for words.

Apparently they’ve been trying for a while to define our nighttime delusions. In 1991, the year of my first birthday, the Lucidity Institute published a laboratory study entitled Other Worlds: Out-of-Body Experiences and Lucid Dreams. The report compared the experience of a lucid dream with the out of body experiences dying patients often experiences. The report says,

“We have concluded that OBEs can occur in the same physiological state as lucid dreams. If you believe yourself to have been awake, then you are more likely to take the experience at face value and believe yourself to have literally left your physical body in some sort of mental or "astral" body floating around in the "real" physical world. If you think of the experience as a dream, then you are likely to identify the OBE body as a dream body image and the environment of the experience as a dream world.”

When they’re dreaming, these people literally feel like they’re leaving their bodies and going to heaven, Nirvana, or whatever term organized religion chooses to put on the euphoria the comes from complete satisfaction. You may not want to reach god in your brain, but you have to at least be awestruck at the magnificent show your mind is putting on.

So the next time you’re heading to bed, stop before you set that sleep timer. Take a second to think about the worlds of wishful thinking you could be missing out on.