A question to lose sleep over

Could that, perhaps, explain the "deadening" effect that many people report feeling on such drugs?

I'd suggest there's a certain "unreliable narrator" effect here. I understand (from watching House) that people deprived of continuous sleep eventually settle into a pattern of microsleep, where they fall asleep for minutes or seconds at a time. Typically they're unaware of it since it generally happens when they let their attention flag or wander.I hope Chiro wasn't operating heavy machinery. (And I don't mean to suggest that he's an unreliable person.)

So I'm reading the wikipedia article on sleep (you know, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep):

quote:

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Asking "Why do we awaken?" instead of "Why do we sleep?" yields a different perspective of how sleep and its stages contribute to a healthy organism.

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That's certainly an interesting perspective. Maybe being awake is so taxing on the body that it's a state that can be maintained for only so long. Maybe being sentient is something that our brains can't maintain constantly. It certainly becomes a very interesting question indeed when you stop thinking of wakefulness as the default, natural state of being.