Recently after a restless night, my wife claimed she hadn't slept at all.  Her claim caused me to check how long we can really stay awake.

The official world record for staying awake was set at a science fair project in 1965.  It's eleven days, or two hundred and sixty-four hours.  In the end the student involved, though technically awake, was unable to think clearly.  He returned to normal after a few nights' sleep.  Several volunteers have achieved eight, nine or ten days of wakefulness without serious permanent consequences.

Sleep deprivation usually produces no significant changes in blood pressure, heart rate, reflexes or muscle power.  It's our reasoning and cognitive functions, and the ability to remember things that suffers.

Most people need less sleep as they get older.  On average newborns may sleep twenty hours a day, young children eleven hours, teenagers nine hours.  Forty year olds sleep between seven and eight hours, and the over fifties often less than six hours.

Certain rare medical disorders such as Morvan's Syndrome can leave the patient without sleep for several months.  Although sufferers from this disease don't feel sleepy, they do experience hallucinations, pain, muscle twitching and circulatory problems.

So next time you go to bed, remember a good night's sleep is one of life's great blessings.

MOVING BEYOND MATTER
 by Christopher Shennan

Sleep, like just about everything else in life, can be both a good and a bad thing — depending on how much or how little it is engaged in.  Like medicine, sleep must be taken in the proper doses.

You may seen a book entitled:  "Don't Sleep Through the Revolution."  I think the author's point was that sleep can be more than a physical phenomena.  We can "sleep" through an event when we desperately need to be awake.  I think of examples such as, maybe, a fire, or a military attack.

There are some social ills we do not address because we are "asleep" to the damage and distress they cause.  We are mostly aware of these ills, but do nothing about them because we are too comfortable with our own existence.  Like the person who punches the snooze button on his alarm clock repeatedly to get just a few extra minutes sleep, we silence the alarm going off in our society.  We put off doing something about a social injustice, because we want to enjoy our tranquility just a little longer.

Of course, it is unrealistic to involve ourselves in every worthy cause.  But we can involve ourselves in at least one cause that needs addressing.  

Now when it comes to the spiritual realm, we find it is even easier to "sleep through" things that have to do with our spiritual well-being, than those that relate to the physical.

Somehow we feel that the physical is more real than spiritual issues, which we often perceive to be somewhat vague and of little immediate consequence.

But what if we really understood that the spiritual things are of more, much more vital concern than the physical?  What if our physical needs, as important as they are, were only a shadow, compared to the issue of our eternal destiny, for instance.  After all, the physical only has to do with time, while the spiritual has to do with eternity.

Are you "sleeping through" your spiritual crisis, or are you beginning to "wake up"?