20 Sleep Facts you didn’t know! Some serious sleep stats from Millbrook Contract Beds

Millbrook Contract Beds spends a lot of its time on Twitter and Facebook sharing our love of sleep with our followers. We regularly tweet and update about sleep facts and sleep related stories. So we thought, why not take all we have learned and collected over the past year of Tweeting and compile it into a comprehensive fact list? Bear in mind these are just a handful of the facts we have researched (in total there is probably more like 300 odd facts we have learnt about sleep, beds, dreams and sleep disorders).

#1 – People can sleep with their eyes open and not even be aware that they are doing it.

#2 – The average adult needs to sleep a total of 7 to 9 hours per day.

#3 – 50% of people over the age of 60 suffer with some type of sleep disorder.

#4 – The world record for the longest period without sleep stands at 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes. Although it is not recommended that people try to break it because…

#5 – A person needs sleep to function. To go without sleep for an elongated period without close medical supervision can be fatal.

#6 – If it takes a person more than 5-15 minutes to fall asleep every night it could mean that they are sleep deprived.

#7 –  REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep causes the sleeper a paralysis that they are unaware of.

#8 –REM sleep kicks in after 90 minutes after we fall asleep and lasts for approximately 2 hours.

#9 –  If you ever dream that you yourself are taking a nap during your dream it could be a sign that you need to relax and take it easy more. Sleeping in your own dreams can also symbolise that you are at peace.

#10 – New born babies typically result in 400-750 hours of lost sleep for new parents in the first year.

#11 – REM dreams are often characterized by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery.

#12 – It is theorised by some sleep scientists that we dream to fix our experiences in our long-term memory – we dream about things that are worth remembering.

#14 – A scientific mystery remains so as scientists have still not been able to explain how shining a bright light on the back of human knees resets the brains sleep-wake clock.

#15 – Exposure to noise during the night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.

# 16 – “Natural alarm clock” (allowing people to wake up more or less when they want to) is caused by a burst of stress hormones. This is caused due to an unconscious anticipation of waking up.

#17 – It is unknown if any other species dreams as we do…

#18 – This should come as no surprise to parents but teenagers tend to sleep on an average of 10 hours per night.

#19 – The position that you sleep in reflects your personality.

#20 – Brains are far more active while they are sleeping than they are watching TV.

And there’s your lot… for now!

For more on sleep facts please follow Millbrook Contract Beds on Twitter and Facebook.

Lucid Revolution – insights into lucid dreaming from Millbrook

Millbrook Contract Beds isn’t just about comfortable, quality beds. The Millbrook team is obsessed with dreaming and sleeping – never on the job! – and we love exploring the nature of those weird and wonderful things. They are so alluring, mysterious and surreal that they capture our imaginations. We dream every night and yet we barely understand the phenomenon of dreaming.

Dreams represent the ultimate mystery for many of us. They have the power to excite and terrify us and they subconsciously shape the way that we live our lives. Dreams are amazing things and one of the most amazing things about dreams has to be lucid dreaming. Whether you’re lucidly dreaming from a contract bed in a hotel or a cosy bed in your own home, the concept is extraordinary.

Lucid dreaming is the ability to consciously take control of your dream as it happens. Taking control of your dream like this allows you to sculpt the world of your dream and make it work for you. Imagine an Inception-style adventure where you’re growing a world around you, raising skyscrapers, giant canyons and mountains or even transforming purple skies. That’s not just an exciting concept for Millbrook Contract Beds, it’s irresistibly tempting for everyone who has ever woken up wanting more from their dreams.

In a lucid dream, you become completely and consciously aware that you are asleep and dreaming. This awareness leads your mind to realise that the dream is no longer an abstract collection of impulses and thought-processes. From that point of realisation, providing nothing wakes you up, you know that you are dreaming and you can turn the dream into a fantasy playground.

People use lucid dreams to achieve their deepest desires. A popular theme in lucid dreaming is the power of flight. As people realise that they are dreaming, they take to the skies like Superman and fly through vast cities. Flying is the ultimate freedom and being able to achieve it in your dreams is nothing short of miraculous. From the comfort of your Millbrook bed, you can fly across vast oceans, fly through canyons or soar up to the top of the tallest buildings. The exhilaration of flight is a popular and basic desire in millions of people all over the world, especially the comic book fan-boys and girls that idolise airborne superheroes.

Not everyone uses lucid dreaming to realise their childhood dreams. A far greater proportion of lucid dreamers use lucid dreams to indulge in the ultimate fantasy behaviour. Sexual lucid dreams are a place to innocently act out your ultimate fantasies without harming anyone. These types of dreams are more common in younger men and decrease with age; the opposite is true in women, where women experience more of these dreams as they get older. If you do start to indulge in these lucid dreams, don’t blame Millbrook Contract Beds when your partner finds out!

This is a very interesting article on how to start to practice lucid dreaming using mental exercises. Give them a go and you could be lucidly dreaming like the best of them. The Contract Beds team at Millbrook is already practicing…

Dreamscape Part 3 – The importance of dreams in our lives

In the last two blogs we have explored the realm of dreams and nightmares to understand to some extend how they work. The importance of dreams and what they do for us while we rest is vital. During the night you can work through many anxieties and stresses that burden you in your waking life. Sleep and dreams go hand-in-hand as psychological release valves for all the things that your conscious and subconscious processes on a day to day basis.

In this third part of our Dreamscape blog series we here at Millbrook Contract Beds have turned our attentions to digging deeper into this heavily layered, meaning laden universe where the impossible becomes possible and the dreams we experience open our minds up to the limitless realms of the imagination.

So why is dreaming important? Why do we need it?

The real question is; do you sleep in order to dream or do you dream in order to sleep?

Dreams act as more than just fantasy plays for the subconscious; they are actually integral to shaping and conditioning the personality and behaviour of the sleeper. A person who is deprived of dreams through poor quality sleep, whether it is from audible disturbances, sleep disorders, worn out contract beds, unbalanced room temperatures etc. will noticeably suffer shifts in mood and character the following day.

Dreaming is our literal escape for both mind and body. It allows your brain to work through issues (ones you are both aware and unaware of) and it leaves time for your body to rest and regenerate. Dreaming is a key part of being human.

What has scientific research found on the subject?

Studies have found that people intentionally woken up before drifting into REM sleep (where dreaming begins) are left impaired for their general daily functioning. It has been argued that it is not just the sleep deprivation but also the denial of the brain’s release and its allowance to dream. Test have been conducted over the years to prove this definitively and evidence emerged that test subjects experienced disorientation, depression, short temper and irritability the next day.

The deprivation of REM sleep has been shown to cause over-sensitivity, loss of concentration and in some cases memory loss.

Obviously dreaming is an important element of remaining healthy both psychologically and physically revitalising a person for their next wake-up call. Dreams act as metaphor and enigmas in our heads to help us fight our demons, our fears, our worries, all the things that play on our subconscious and inform everything that we do in our day-to-day live. So when viewed in this context dreaming is actually VERY important.

Our experience in the area of sleep and dreams has led us to build up our contract bed collections over the years in order to provide the best quality sleep experiences. If you would like to contact us please do or you can follow Millbrook Contract Beds on Twitter.

We hope that you continue to have sweet dreams in the meantime…

Dreamscape Part 2 – Millbrook Contract Beds explores your nightmares

In the previous blog Millbrook Contract Beds explored the nature of dreams and some of the principles surrounding them. One of the angles we investigated was how to achieve an optimum dream state that allows the sleeper to begin lucid dreaming. To read that blog CLICK HERE.

Following on from the initial research carried out, we decided to go deeper into the dreamscapes that we all experience every night.

Dreams and sleep are dictated by the terms in which sleeping environments and daily routine affect us emotionally and physically. This leads us into the areas of the less peaceful night’s sleep where anxiety and stress envelope the dreamer into a state of perpetual psychologically rendered horror, worry and/or panic.

Welcome to the nightmare realm…

A Nightmare on Elm Street - Copyright New Line Cinema 1984

So what are nightmares exactly?

We are entering into the subcategory of dreams here.

The defining aspect of a nightmare is that it is a highly emotional experience, usually with an emphasis on the negative. People tend to wake up in the middle of the night if the nightmare is particularly intense – usually people remember a nightmare more than they would a dream due to its intensity. Ultimately, nightmares have a larger impact on the mind. People who are particularly sensitive or imaginative are more prone to experience them.

What causes them?

As is the case with dreams, the true answer is still an unknown factor. However, nightmares have a more attainable answer in the sense that they are most likely triggered by the external environment and emotional resonances collected and stored throughout the day. Nightmares can be catalysed by extreme anxieties or concerns about lifestyle, routine, health, work, financial issues, love life, any number of significant variables.

They can also stem from deeper unconscious fears that are your mind’s way of warning you about problems that you have internalised and possibly even repressed. Understanding what nightmares mean can often lead to a solution of some sort regarding whatever internal conflict you may be suffering.

How do you combat against nightmares?

You have to address your circumstances and surroundings piece by piece.

If it is psychological, it may be harder to battle against. Work related and money driven anxieties are often at the top of people’s lists. These worries can lead to seriously intense, sometimes even terrifying dreams that highlight your mental state’s inability to cope with these issues. The only way of resolving this is by talking it out with the people around you and finding real-world solutions to such woes, no matter how impossible and unlikely they may seem to accomplish.

Sometimes, nightmares are merely the product of a bad sleep environment or lifestyle choices. Eating before bed is a common cause for discomfort while sleeping, which can lead to an onset of anxiety-ridden dreams and nightmares.

Sometimes it has a lot to do with bad contract beds or bad contract bedding. If your bed is lumpy with broken or defunct springs; sags in the middle; rolls to one side; deflated or torn; crumbling bed base; worn and torn bedding; swollen pillows etc. then you need to seriously think about replacing these things.

Contract beds are about giving you an optimum night’s sleep and the longer you leave a bed to decay through natural wear and tear usage, the more you increase your chances of disturbed or anxiety laden sleep each night. Bad dreams can simply be conjured through the physical discomfort of a person in bed.

It requires a discipline both psychologically and physically to help overcome nightmares, particualryl recurring nightmares.

There is much more to explore in the realm of dreams and sleep that will give you much to think about, chew on and digest. More to come in our next part of Dreamscape.

Follow us on Twitter for more updates from the world of sleep.

Dreamscape Part 1 – Millbrook Contract Beds explores your dreams

Into the land of nod and beyond the world of dreams we go…

Millbrook Contract Beds has had a healthy obsession with the landscape of dreams for as long as we have been studying sleep.

What makes dreams so fascinating to us is that when you get under the covers in your bed and drift off to sleep you find yourself journeying into the unknown every single night! The unconscious mind is a maze of imagination, impossibilities, secrets and truths. Even if you don’t think you dream – you do! Research has proven that everybody dreams but some people can’t always remember the dreams when they wake up, or that they were even dreaming at all.

What are dreams?

The truth is no one really knows for sure. The inner workings of the human mind are one of the biggest mysteries of all and therefore dream exploration is still discovering new and exciting things. Dreams are best described as the mind’s involuntary conjuring up of images, emotions and ideas during REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement). Dreams can occur in any of the four stages of the sleep cycle, although the most vivid and memorable dream experiences occur in the last stage of the sleep cycle.

The question people predominantly ask is, “What causes them?”

The answer is more likely to lend itself to a neurological, scientific based retort, but there is no definitive explanation that satisfies everyone. All we know as dreamers is that dreams can be the most surreal, imaginative, intense, and enlightening experiences we ever truly have.

Their meanings have been the subject of much debate and discussion over the centuries from ancient Greek philosophers to modern day blockbuster movies like Inception, which explored the nature of lucid dreaming.

One of the many surreal dreams of the movie Inception, Copyright Warner Bros. 2010

What is lucid dreaming?

It is simply being asleep and dreaming, fully aware that you are dreaming. You may have experienced dreams like this before. To accomplish this you need to get a combination of certain factors in order including comfort, space and a prepared mind.

How do I optimise my dream states?

In order to dream more frequently, or to work towards accomplishing a lucid dream-like state, you need to create the right seeping environment.

Tailor your environment to give you the best of these things – a clean room equals a clear mind; the state of your contract bedroom furniture is key; the right bedding and pillows; durable contract bed frame and base; size and shape of the mattress; noise proof arena etc. Then it is a matter of practice.

Identify your needs as a sleeper in order to accurately create a stable and peaceful environment for lucid dreaming. At Millbrook Contract Beds, we of course recognise the benefits of high quality contract beds and commercial beds, which is a defining factor involved here in the sleep & dream experience.

This concludes our introduction to dreams and sleep, which shall be continued in Part 2 of this blog series. Contact Us for information regarding our products or for some impartial sleep advice.

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