In between school, practice, extracurriculars or a long shift at work, LHS Patriots spend the entire day thinking about the time it ends. Sleep experts recommend that the average student sleep for 8-10 hours nightly. Quality sleep allows us to recharge our physical, social and mental batteries in order to take on the day ahead. Even though these seemingly short hours are the times we get to truly rest, our brains are still active. While we sleep, the brain goes through a repeated process called the sleep cycle, each phase lasting around 90-110 minutes.
As the stages within the cycle progress, sleep becomes deeper until the final stage:Rapid Eye Movement (REM). In REM sleep, the brain becomes more active, heart rate increases, the senses engage and pictures begin to roll through the mind. Dreaming helps our brains organize thoughts, analyze recent events, process emotions and consolidate memories. Often strange and nonsensical, dreams can vary from flying in the air to having teeth fall out. Here is what LHS Patriots have experienced throughout the night.
“I fought in a crazy zombie apocalypse while being inside Lincoln. It was the middle of the night, and there were zombies everywhere, and the only way to save myself was to become a band kid, which was really scary at the time, and for some reason, I totally crashed out. Anyway, I somehow got locked into a room and befriended one of the zombies, but later on, it tried to eat me. Very scary. Dr. Chiarello was also there, but he was the leader of the zombies, and he controlled them by yelling at them and playing the bass. I ended up saving everyone and exploding the building somehow, but yeah it was super intense, and my zombie friend died in the explosion. I also was crying for some reason after, probably something I don’t remember that happened,” said an anonymous LHS student.
“I had a dream where I was walking in my neighborhood at night, and I stopped by a house that I just thought was kind of nice [and began] to mime smoking a cigarette. I looked to my left, and there was a 40-something-year-old man who was also miming smoking a cigarette and admiring this house. I gave him a smile since we were doing the same thing, and decided to walk away, but then he started following me. I started walking faster, and so did he. Luckily, I saw a friend who is a lot taller and stronger than I am, and I ran up to him, and he helped me outrun that creepy middle-aged man,” said Carsen A. Shaw-Moua.
“I had this dream on a Saturday, and it started off in an arena for wrestling, and it was made out of concrete and had purple decorations. I remember that I went to look around and found Sammy (my wrestling teammate), and we ended up in this one room with [stationary workout] bikes. We were messing around until Ernster came in and gave us a sort of disapproving look, and so we stopped. For some reason, I felt guilty, so I went up to him and apologized, but shifted the blame onto Sammy. He said it was okay, then he walked away, and so did I. The next part was leaving the arena, and Dylan let me drive (my best friend). I remember that I was trying to multitask while driving because I was holding a pencil in my mouth while I was flipping through a book and had a notebook out, and then the cars ahead of me stopped at the red light, so I tried to slowly stop, but I ended up going too fast and crashing into the car in front of me. In the dream, I closed my eyes, and I was telling myself that this was a dream, but I didn’t wake up, so I felt guilty because I had just crashed my best friend’s car, but then I woke up,” said Agustin Perez.
