Night School summary

If you’ve ever been out camping in the wilderness or spent some time in a cabin, away from electricity, you may have noticed that the quality of your sleep improves. This is because the invention of the light bulb has completely changed our relationship with sleep.

The inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, considered sleep to be a waste of time. The way he saw it, why sleep when he could be inventing gadgets in his New Jersey laboratory? The only thing stopping him from working around the clock was the difficulty of working by candlelight or oil lamps at night.

Everyone knows the tragic story of the Titanic, but what was the root cause of the ship striking the iceberg that led to its demise? Was it merely that the captain had the ship going too fast – or did sleep deprivation also play a role?

We may never know all the circumstances at play with the sinking of the Titanic, but we do know that sleep deprivation can have a hand in such fateful disasters.

You may have met people who brag about how little sleep they need in order to feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning. Some of them might just be trying to impress you, but others may well be telling the truth.

In the 1970s, sleep psychologist Ray Meddis discovered a remarkable phenomenon after he was introduced to a 70-year-old woman, known as Miss M., who claimed she only needed one hour of sleep per night.

If you’ve ever had trouble sleeping, you’ve probably realized that the harder you try, the less likely you’ll be to actually drift off.

For centuries, people around the world have struggled to get to sleep and, as a result, have come up with a host of different tricks and tips for catching some shuteye.

Have you ever opened your refrigerator in the morning and found your leftovers were gone? Or maybe there’s evidence that someone came into your kitchen and prepared an entire meal while you were asleep? Before you call the police to report a hungry burglar, you should know that there might also be a perfectly innocent explanation.

Sleepwalking is a mysterious phenomenon that almost always occurs in the deep sleep phases before rapid eye movement sets in.

If you’ve ever wished you could break an annoying habit, you might be able to do it in your sleep.

In 1942, psychologist Lawrence LeShan observed a group of boys at a New York summer camp in order to conduct a sleep experiment. He split the camp into two groups: those who bite their nails and those who didn’t. The nail-biters were then split into two groups, one being a control group that would not receive any sleep suggestion, and one that would.

You likely wouldn’t consider a nightmare about being trapped on an examination table and cut open by an evil doctor to be a good thing – but there’s a reason we have such graphic or terrifying dreams.

Dreams are an important way for us to process our life experiences, especially when they’re difficult or traumatic.