Sweet dreams are made of this: Learning in your sleep

The average human spends about a third of their lifetime asleep. That equates to about a quarter of a million hours, or roughly 26 years. If you include time trying to go to sleep, and restless nights, a person will have spent over 30 years of their time on Earth lying in bed, assuming you make it to the ripe old age of 90.

These calculations, and I’m trusting the internet on this because I’ve never been good with figures, are based on a body getting a healthy eight hours a day. But we all know few people actually get the required amount of rest a human needs to function properly and that is why most people either shuffle around like zombies or, in the case of mass caffeine consumption, are as jittery as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

All that being said, and the fact that to be healthy you must sleep aside, that seems like a lot of time wasted. With our waking moments crammed with the obligations and monotonous tasks required by this great society of ours, it seems a shame that most of our free time is spent with our eyes closed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good sleep and I am usually the first person among my family and friends to call it night, but I always end the day with too many tasks left undone. There are things I want to learn, skills I want to cultivate. I often leave work with lofty expectations for my evening, that I will make time to run a few miles or practice playing guitar and the like.

But that’s not often the case, and as any one with a family can attest, time slips away from you and by the time you get to sit down a spell, closing your eyes for a moment seems like a great idea. The next thing you know, tomorrow has come and gone.

There may be hope for me yet though. New research suggests that people can communicate and strengthen skills while sleeping and dreaming, particularly in lucid dreams, a state of sleep where the brain recognizes it is experiencing a dream.

For instance, dreaming about playing the piano or speaking in a foreign language will register as practice for that skill. The dreamer will wake up and the body will retain that experience as if it really happened.

The setback, however, is that my dream self is quite inept. In my dreams (I guess you can call these nightmares) I can never perform the skills that I want to improve. If I need to run, my feet are like anchors. If an instrument is placed in my hands, I can’t make it produce anything close to music.

I’ve never been one to put meaning to a dream, but if a dream can improve your abilities can it also impair them?

I may need to drop some hobbies, but at least I’m getting enough shut eye.