Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
How you can fall asleep faster—and without any medication—by using the Two-Pillow Ear Bud Sleeping Trick. Most people are side sleepers, upwards of 80 percent. Chances you are too. As side sleepers, they’re more comfortable sleeping mostly on their sides. This makes listening to sleep music, binaural beats, or sleeping sounds with your typical earbud…
Find yourself waking up angry because of a dream? Don’t let it go! Don’t forget it. Go on, write it down! We might do something only because it makes sense to do it. We brush our teeth, for example, because we want to avoid cavities. It makes sense to avoid cavities. They’re painful and…
A child of seventeen—a girl—country bred—untaught—ignorant of war, the use of arms, and the conduct of battles—modest, gentle, shrinking—yet throws away her shepherd’s crook and clothes herself in steel, and fights her way through a hundred and fifty of hostile territory, never losing heart or hope and never showing fear and comes—she to whom a…
Let us take a moment to appreciate the complexity of the human body—both yours and mine—and how this complexity affects how and why we sleep. For that, we will turn our attention to the limbic system located in the brain. You don’t hear much about this group of structures, though you feel their effects every…
You must balance everything in your mind. If you think this always goes off without interior controversy, you’re sorely mistaken.
She shows up with a smallish shrunken cooked head on a plate. The head was attached to some shoulders. I was surprised, taken back. It’s a dead human I’d be eating! I hesitate at first and then start eating. It’s delicious.
Remembering even one thing can help you. All dreams aren’t sweet. Remembering some dreams is like trying to grab motor oil streaming out of an engine: slippery, unpleasant, hot, messy, confusing, and imperfect. Like the backyard mechanic performing routine car maintenance, one can have their “oil collection container” (think dream journal or scrap paper) handy.…
Buy 10 drinks, your 11th is free. Stay five nights, your sixth is free. Accumulate 10,000 points by flying, shopping, and bonuses, and you get a free flight. All kinds of businesses have customer loyalty programs. Should you make a personal loyalty program where you reward yourself for being loyal to yourself? Almost every business…
One common reason people take narcotics and hallucinogens is to “relax” and “chill out.” They want to take the edge off of the hardness of life. The dangers and disadvantages of those often-illegal drugs are well known. Who hasn’t heard of overdoses, the lost families, the problems that they cause? Why in Hell would anyone…
The rhythm of life, for most people, goes something like this: every day they’re awake, every night they’re asleep. The hours awake and asleep change as do some of the other particulars. Sleeping is something we do every day. We all sleep. We all need to sleep. And we need to sleep for several hours…
The first few lines of the dream journal entry read like a list: A park in summer with a bandstand. The Beach Boys song “When I Grow Up to Be a Man” playing in the background (The bandstand was empty. Neither the Beach Boys nor any other band was playing in the bandstand. The song…
You can’t really massage yourself to sleep. Not really. When it comes to yourself, stretching works better, though there are instructions for massaging yourself. For massaging yourself, you’ve got to use the more active parts of your mind. That makes it hard to drift off. Even if it doesn’t take much thinking to massage yourself,…
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. And they’re right, though 1,000 words is approximate. It very well might be much more. Drawings show. Words tell. Sometimes it’s easier, quicker, and clearer to show than tell. Make drawings of your dreams Do it even if you think you don’t draw well, even if…