Comfort blanket

It's the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness... oh, and getting the electric blanket checked. This is the time of year when safety officials set up events to check blankets - invariably finding that many of them are dodgy.

It might still seem too warm to even think about electric blankets, but give it a few months and they will be the best friend you ever had. On a cold night, in the miserable damp of a city winter, there is nothing finer than stretching out in the warm nest of the electric blanket. It makes going to bed a moment to savour. There's that slightly singed smell and that curvaceous reassurance of the heated quilt.

It's also not widely known that electric blankets are a spin-off from wartime technology, the materials developed to keep Second World War aircrews warm in freezing unheated planes. There had been earlier versions used in TB clinics, but it was wartime that fast-forwarded their arrival as a consumer product.

They weren't cheap either. The first mass-market electric blankets, on sale in 1946, retailed at around $40.

Not enough time to sleep

I was loading the dishwasher this morning when I noticed that the latest dishwasher tablets included a spectacular new time-saving invention. They no longer had to be taken out of their plastic wrapping. The whole lot could be shoved in where the wrapper would melt away. "Less hassle" promised the advertising flannel on the box.

How much hassle was it really to pull off a wrapper? What was I going to do with the massive amount of time I was going to save, maybe as much as six or seven seconds?

When I was growing up we didn't have a dishwasher, no one did except in homes of the future featured on Tomorrow's World. Instead we had to use our hands. And so in terms of time-saving, we should have hours more spare time, now that the washing up is done for us by a machine. Not to machine a washing machine, the microwave, online shopping...

Except the more time-saving devices we have, right up to self-unwrapping dishwasher tablets, the less time we seem to have. A survey of commuters published this morning said that if they had one hour extra each day the most popular activity for this extra time would be sleeping. They were completely knackered.

So how is it that in a world so perfectly evolved that we no longer have to pick plastic from dishwasher tablets that we don't even have enough time to sleep, that most basic of physical necessities?

Pyjamas day and night

There's a classic of the My Drug Hell genre running in the newspapers, as they recount the problems faced by Whitney Houston. But what seems to have really outraged people is the claim that she spent seven months in her pyjamas. In a dodgy tracksuit day and night would have been fine, all-purpose denim would have passed without comment... but pyjamas. Now that's just plain immoral.

The joys of pandiculation

It's one of my favourite words. "Pandiculation." It's that type of huge yawn where you stretch your arms upwards to the heavens and at the same time stretch out your back and maybe even, on special occasions, your legs too. It's yawning with your entire body.

It's one of those physical pleasures, like scratching an itch, that everyone enjoys. Yawning isn't really about getting in extra oxygen - and there are all kinds of theories about its purpose. But increasingly it's being looked at as a social response, yawning being triggered not by any physical need, but because we're all copycats. When someone else yawns, we yawn.

That goes for animals too. Dogs, who sleep all the time and so aren't even remotely sleep deprived, are always yawning. Researchers have found that what prompts this is hanging around with yawning humans. They're copying us.

Researchers in the United States this week have taken this a step further. Not only are animals inspired to yawn by other creatures, but an experiment wanted to find whether chimpanzees could be made to yawn by a cartoon. Guess what? The chimps watching a cartoon of chimps yawning started to yawn. It's contagious.

Sleeping together

How is it that in adulthood you end up with less personal space than in childhood? I had my own room growing up, now all my stuff is crammed in cupboards that seem to get smaller and more overcrowded every year.

Sharing a bed is part of this grown up life. But a leading sleep researcher, Neil Stanley, says that we should consider the joys of sleeping apart. The British Science Festival heard suggestions that sleep is less likely to be disturbed when couples sleep in separate beds. It might feel as though sleeping together is more comfortable and reassuring, but apparently we end up wrecking each others' shut-eye.

It's interesting how the idea of living together has becomes so associated with sleeping together. Aristocrats in previous centuries would have had their own separate sleeping quarters, there was no assumption that his lordship and her ladyship would have to kip on the same pillow.

It was poor families in cramped houses that were forced to share beds. And sharing a bed didn't necessarily mean anything romantic. Large families were squashed into a single bed, strangers staying at inns might be expected to share a bed. Pepys records sharing a bed with friends who stayed over.

There were also pungent words to describe lots of people sharing a bed or a sleeping place together: "Pigging" and "Chumming."

Heart breaker

As if insomnia wasn't cruel enough a punishment, research from the University of Montreal suggests that the nightly ordeal of the sleepless is also seriously bad for their hearts.

Insomniacs have heightened blood pressure which in turn is linked to long-term damage to the heart. While the blood pressure of good sleepers drops during the night, those poor long-suffering insomniacs have their blood pressure cranked up even higher.

There's nothing more debilitating than that moment when you wake and realise that you're more tired than when you went to sleep. Now the insomniac gets even more bad news.

The old, old story

Fascinating story in the Telegraph about the origin of fairy tales - based on research by Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University. Looking at different versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story, he found a recurring pattern of similar stories in different cultural settings which suggested that versions of the tale had been in circulation for at least 2,600 years.

Just as languages can be related back to a common ancestor, so too with the fairy tale.

What were our ancestors trying to pass on through such stories? There must have been warnings, or shared experiences, that were passed on through such archetypal tales. Like dreams, they occupy that territory between the collective consciousness and individual fears and memories.

One of the most common themes in fairy tales is sleeping, often an enchanted or magical sleep. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are the most famous examples - with the original folk stories much more brutal, and more suggestive, than the Disneyfied versions. Sleep in fairy tales is a mysterious state - suspended between life and death. Take it a step further, where fairy tales turn into myths, and in Greek mythology sleep, the healer, is the twin of death, both children of the night.

Sleep isn't only about the functional hours of rest, it has its own mystery and culture.

Autumn leaves

The nights are drawing in, autumn is hanging around the park gates, it's getting more tempting to stay in bed for a few more minutes in the morning. Even though the seasons change, the timetable of work and school stays the same.

It's even more of a shock to the system later in the year and then in the spring when the clocks start being switched backwards and forwards. I've never been convinced about the need for all that messing around with the time.

What happens to people's sleep when the hour is shifted?

A study in the United States has looked at what happens when the clocks are moved forward.

People don't readjust by going to bed earlier, instead they sleep less. Sleep deprived workers are more likely to make mistakes - and researchers found a marked increase in workplace accidents on the Monday following the change of clocks. These accidents caused lost days - and in a really striking statistic, the researchers found a 68% increase in lost work days following the clocks being changed.

Ignoring the need to sleep can cost more than a few tired hours.

Lying down on the job

It must be in the running for the best job. A 22-year-old student is being paid to test luxury beds, with the comfortable hours of 10am to 6pm.

According to an interview in the Telegraph, student Roisin Madigan will report on what makes a really good sleeping experience, while testing the beds of Simon Horn Ltd.

For anyone who thinks this seems rather indulgent, then I'd say why shouldn't we get as much pleasure as possible from sleep? Sleep is a very good thing, so why can't we allow ourselves to enjoy it. Sleep shouldn't be something hurried and neglected, it should be luxuriated in, savoured like a fine wine or a really pleasurable meal. We should recognise the different types of sleep and differentiate between what makes a good and a bad night.

And so to bed.

Meaning of sleep? What's the point of being awake?

Why do we sleep? It's such a basic question, but there's no agreed answer and debate continues to set out ideas.

An article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience suggests that rather than looking for a single universal evolutionary function for sleep, we should see the dozing animal as part of a wider sweep of nature which includes the dormant states of plants. These phases of resting and activity reflect nature's best efforts to make use of the resources available. So a creature which depends on hunting during the night will shape its sleep patterns to optimise its chances of success.

I've always thought that sleeping and waking are not opposites, but are integral to each other - and so looking for the purpose of sleep is the same as looking for the purpose of being awake. Sleep isn't a lesser state which needs to explain itself. We should consider the possibility that sleep is the default position, a state of dormancy being closer to nature than being awake. There are some simple creatures that spend almost all their lifetime in a state of rest, stirred into brief rushes of activity only when threatened or needing food. For them being awake is an occasional unpleasant aberration, while the majority of their life is the calm rhythm of inactivity.

In the living world, for plants as well as animals, the patterns of day and night, rising and falling, birth and death, winter and summer, are profoundly rooted - and in this pattern must also lie the idea of sleeping and waking, one not possible without the other.

But the search for an explanation for sleep shouldn't beguile us into thinking that being awake is the higher state of being. Being awake is what we prioritise because it's where our culture stores its prizes. It's where we work, promote our individualism, assert our power, it's where economic status resides. Sleep has none of this, it's a mysterious, curious place, nothing to do with money or social status. It operates on a level much closer to nature. It's where we're only a few unconscious breaths away from other living creatures.

Italian Marie Claire

The Sleepyhead book is now resting its head in the soft pillows of the Italian edition of Marie Claire. I'm not sure what I'm meant to be saying about the book in this interview, but it looks very fetching. How do they make stuff look so darned stylish? Here's the link to the article in the "Stare bene" section, which according to the Google-style translator means "Stay healthy".

Before the head hits the pillow

Adults can only envy the way a child can fall so completely and deeply asleep. It's like an on-off switch, going from being awake into profound sleep. I remember long summer holiday days in my own childhood, a city kid helping out on my grandfather's farm, tired and sunny, falling asleep before my head hit the pillow.

But there are plenty of kids who don't find it easy to fall asleep. My own children get thrown out of their regular pattern during the holidays and stay up too late and get too tired.

So what might help them to fall asleep? Part of the answer, according to research in the cheerfully-titled Archives of Disease in Childhood, is to run around a lot during the day.

Researchers have calculated the relationship between how much exercise children have during the day and the rapidity of falling asleep.

Studying a group of children with an average age of seven, researchers found that for every hour of sedentary activity - whether it was watching television or reading a book - an extra three minutes was added to the time it took children to fall asleep. Increasing the amount of physical exercise during the day meant a corresponding reduction in the amount of time it took to fall asleep.

So the answer is to run around all day for an instant sleep at night.

Sunny Jim

Hats off to the former prime minister, Jim Callaghan. An article in the Daily Mail highlights concerns that the current incumbent, Gordon Brown, isn't getting enough shut-eye. The 24-hour culture of news seems to have pushed political life into a sleepless marathon. Not good for anyone. Better the example of Jim Callaghan who had the good sense to have a sleep each afternoon. According to a former assistant, his catchphrase for such occasions was: "Better well rested than well briefed." What wise words.

Train of thought

For anyone about to catch a train to work in the morning, here's a little rail trivia. I'd heard of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but I'd never heard of a Railroad Hall of Fame. Maybe they're both for people who made great tracks.

But this Railroad Hall of Fame has a new member, in the form of George Pullman, who gave his name to comfortable train travel and phrases such as pullman lounges, pullman cases and pullman kitchens.

Pullman is credited with creating the first railway sleeper cars, which were known as "palace cars" because of their glamour and luxury. Passengers on the long journeys across the United States needed more comfort than a hard seat - and Pullman's sleepers from the 1860s held the promise of being hotels on wheels, with fine food and soft beds.

Food for thought

It can be tough to sleep in these hot summer nights. It's a restless, quilt-kicking time of year.

But if you find it hard to stay in bed, spare a thought for the story this week of the woman who sleep walks her way to the fridge each night. Without realising what was happening, each night this poor soul went to the fridge and scoffed huge quantities of food. It wasn't the salad bowl she was raiding either, but the chocolate and cheese compartment. Next thing she knows, she's nine stone heavier and has no idea how it happened. She has been sleepwalking on a munchie mission for all these years.

You've made your bed...

Interesting to see that in the bust-up over MPs' expenses, one member has been praised for her frugality, as she sometimes sleeps on a camp bed in her office. There's something rather penitential about the photograph of the MP sitting on a spartan fold-up bed.

The idea of plain and simple bedding for a higher purpose has very deep roots. There are spiritual retreats where people sleep on stone beds as a way of focusing their thoughts on higher matters and to shake off worldly pleasures. John Wesley was distrustful of beds that were too soft and pleasurable, wanting something starchier and more morally bracing. The camp bed, all function and no frills, modestly ready to be hidden away, is the perfect bed for such uncomfortable times.

Political leaders around the world, sensitive to this puritanical instinct, seem much happier to be seen to be exhausted and sleep deprived. They might be too tired to make any decent decisions, but at least it looks as though they're trying.

Not jet lag but fat lag

Long sleepers are slimmer say researchers - and missing out on sleep is linked to a greater risk of obesity.

This is the result of research into the relationship between weight and sleep patterns. It's good news for the serious sleepers, but it's more anxiety for the sleep starved, who now face the prospect of being overweight as well as exhausted.

I'll leave the complex science of all this to the complex scientists - but something mentioned in these reports struck me as very convincing. Loss of sleep leads to comfort eating.

Anyone who has ever worked a night shift or tried to finish off some work through the middle of the night will know the feeling. You're completely exhausted, you're up all night and you're not really hungry, but you suddenly want to eat the most unhealthy food you can find. It's a ridiculous feeling, light-headed with lack of sleep and then stuffing your head with junk food. It's that haywire moment in the middle of the night.

It's like the confusion of messing around with time zones. Except it's not jet lag, but fat lag.

Wherever I lay my... suitcase

In Canada there has been another of those stories where someone is found living in an airport. The woman had a suitcase, as if ready to travel, but had not caught a flight after a month in the terminal.

What's interesting is that the proof of her "living" in the airport was that was where she slept. Sleeping in a place, on a regular basis, is almost a definition of home. There is something significant about the place we choose to sleep. It confers a particular status. It becomes home. In our insecure, rootless society, where we're all driftwood, where relationships seem so fragile, the search for home becomes even more significant.

And one of the characteristics of the elusive sense of home is that this is the place we sleep, whether it's a suburb we inwardly distrust, the inner-city we want to leave or... an airport terminal.

Wool: The stuff of dreams

How much time do we spend in bed? Not enough, I know. But it's remarkable how little time we spend thinking about what we're sleeping in and what we're sleeping under.

So, by way of experiment, I'm testing a different type of duvet. I've been trying out a duvet filled with wool. Although wool has been a staple of keeping people warm for thousands of years, I'd never had a duvet with wool inside before.

At first glance, it looks flatter than the duvets I've usually used. And in terms of getting into bed, the warmth feels more intense. It is extremely cosy, there is a definite fleece-factor. I'm an enthusiastic sleeper and I like to be warm, so this was very much to my taste. It's big on comfort, in a wrap-around kind of way.

The Woolroom (www.thewoolroom.com) which sells these wool duvets, says that wool is better at helping the sleeper to maintain an even temperature. "It initially raises skin temperature so that you are warm, it insulates you from the cold but also stops you overheating while you sleep."

This ability of the wool to adapt to body temperature is claimed as making the sleeper less likely to feel "clammy". Such quilts are meant to be particularly good at absorbing moisture. Wool quilts also can boast a natural, eco-friendly status.

In the end, regardless of the science, the question the sleeper will want answered is: Was it a good sleep? And the answer is a positive one, it's seriously snug.

But it also occurs to me that we don't have much of a language for comparing sleeps. How do we describe the different sleeps below types of quilt or using types of pillows? How do we distinguish between the sleeps on different beds?

What does a sleep below a wool quilt feel like? If it was a wine, it would be a velvety red. The word that keeps coming back is "intense". I dreamt more, which could have been a coincidence, but it was that kind of rich, snug sleep.

How do you review sleep? For something we do so often, maybe we should be thinking about it more seriously.

Champion sleepers

The French are the champion sleepers of the industrialised world, according to figures from the OECD.

A study of lifestyles across developed countries shows how the amount of sleep varies sharply between cultures.

The French enjoy the most sleep, followed by the slumbering citizens of the United States. At the other end of the scale, the Koreans and Japanese sleep the least. The UK hovers somewhere in the middle, sleeping less than the Spanish or the Australians, but sleeping more than the Italians or the Germans.

Apart from feeling jealousy towards those relaxed French dreamers, it's also a lesson in how much sleep is driven by culture rather than nature. Given that we're all the same human species, it might be expected that sleep would be pretty constant between different countries.

After all, you'd expect cats in Korea and cats in Germany to sleep for the same average amount of time each day, regardless of the passports of their owners. But with humans, there are big national differences, with more than a hour a day in the gap between the French and the Koreans.

Over the course of a year, that means that the French are asleep for a full 15 days more than the Koreans. Think of that, missing out on a full 15 days of uninterrupted sleep.

It shows how much sleep, that glorious natural instinct, can be altered by the pressures of human society.