These are interesting; I went to a lecture at Johns Hopkins University last year by one of the world's leading sleep scientists. He asked his audience (mixed academics/leity) what benefits sleep confers on humans.

Hands went up, and answers ranged from "So that we can dream and thus sort out our daytime experiences" to "So whe have something to do at night" (that was mine), and the lecturer told us science hadn't been able to prove anything about the mental mechanisms of sleep and dreams.

The only thing scientists have been able to figure out that sleep actually does for us, he said, is to keep us from involuntarily falling asleep: if you haven't slept in days, you will fall asleep standing up in the grocery line whether you like it or not.

Thus it's one of the few truly wide-open fields in science. It's only a fifty-year old metiér, and the truths at the core of sleep have yet to be discovered. Makes for exciting science.

Those marine snails find their way into a lot of experiments, don't they? I seem to remember they're some sort of barometer for various pollutants or something as well.

I should spell better.

There was an interesting series on TV a year or so back, called Shattered. It had contestants living together, sort of like Big Brother, but they weren't allowed to sleep. It lasted for a week, and the winner was the one who had not been thrown out for closing their eyes for more than a few seconds at a time, and managed to perform a mental task best at the end. The contestants were given tasks to complete throughout the week, and it was interesting to see how badly their mental capacity diminished due to sleep deprivation.

RE: nightmare
≡ Click to see image ≡

aww..cute!

I had two memorable dreams yesterday. One in which I tried to write down a URL that a girl gave me to something she wanted me to read.

I could *not* write down the damn URL though, it was weird. I kept on starting over, trying again. No matter how hard I tried I could not get down the letters.

Eventualy I was able to get so far as to write an 'h' that looked like an 'n' the :// part was really confused, but I got that, and the 'w's had three or four humps, rather then the customary two.

Finaly I just handed her a bussness card and told her to email me the link.

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Also I had a dream about an online game where you could be any animal in their database. I remember looking at their 'largest' animals, and they had this huge fish that lived in thermal vents. I remember it being 'hundreds of millions of tons' And it looked like a big flat goldfish.

Then I looked up their smallest ones, and they had these single celled things that looked like jelly fish.

Very intresting.

I've been reading about lucid dreaming, and tonight for the first time became aware that I was dreaming. (You train yourself to look for "dreamsigns" awake & asleep.) I got so excited I woke up immediately....

Hey mcgraw, is that conjoined skeleton from the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia? It looks kind of familiar.

They have a pretty wild collection. The soap lady is something else.

Yes, but I have no idea what this animal is.
A tapir? Big tapir.

ahhh! That goes on my "creatures to hug before I die" list!