Perchance To Dream*

Remember when sleep was restful bliss? You would fall asleep almost immediately, and wake up fully rested and full of energy. If you were in your teens or early 20s, you could, and maybe did, sleep ‘til noon. No nighttime visits to the loo, no tossing and turning with insomnia, no snapping awake at 5AM, unable to get back to sleep.

One of the realities of aging is that sleep deteriorates. For a lot of us, sleep is more of an adventure than it used to be. It's shorter and more shallow (shallower?), and insomnia can be a problem occasionally, or chronically. Deep sleep may be a rarity, or wholly absent. Forty winks? Some night, twenty winks would be welcome. If sleep was graded on a scale, it would range from “sleep like in the womb/wake up singing arias” to “death would be better”. (I once woke up singing arias; odd, because I don’t know Italian).

 Most of us intuitively know that lousy 'lifestyle' choices often come back to haunt our dreams, so to speak, but the good news is that you can reduce much of the self-inflicted harm through exercise and smarter living - without giving up the pleasures you so obviously deserve.

As you get older, you sleep less because some of your neurons have gone walkabout. Use of medication - which increases as we age - doesn't help, either.  Here’s more info, for everyone: three different articles (1, 2, 3) with lists of ‘Sleep Stealers’. It’s interesting that the same sleep-stealing activities crop up in all three. Best of all, the articles offer solutions.

*And of course, Bill Shakespeare has a thing or two to say about sleep , as he does most things. Bonus round: how many movie or book titles, and everyday expressions, come from this one soliloquy? 

Hamlet,  Act 3, Scene 1
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

 WS

TNew