By John Rodgers
The clicks of the classroom light switches seem to be a soporific signal; sleep becomes contagious and heads begin to surrender to gravity's mighty weight.
``God, I wish I could just leave the lights on while I show this,'' I whisper to myself as I stroll back to the computer. Yet, I cannot and so begins the drift of students into the deep darkness where Hypnos is ready to welcome any suffering soul. Maybe I'll only lose a few, a handful, or perhaps it's a major loss with numbers near 50 percent. Such is the battle I face each day as a teacher here at a foreign language high school.
I don't imagine it's much different at other high schools on the peninsula given the three-year slog that students are condemned to face. At a time when adolescents are going through all those ``changes'' ― fuelled by sex and growth hormones ― that affect everything from height to facial hair, they are losing a lot of sleep. And there is surely room for concern. Or is there? The problem is that there are differing fields of thought on the issue.
It's hard to argue that less sleep makes you feel better. In the last 10 years there has been an enormous amount of research done on sleep. Most of this has delved into how less time with Hypnos can be detrimental to one's overall well-being. In 2002, Dr. Mary Carskadon of Brown University published ``Adolescent Sleep Patterns,'' which contained further evidence that teens are sleeping less and finding their health deteriorating.
She reported that teens she researched who were sleep deprived consistently had greater levels of melancholy: ``In every study where we've looked at it, it's crystal clear that kids who sleep less report more depressed mood.'' Another sleep expert, Dr. Ronald E. Dahl at the University of Pittsburgh, has reported that lack of sleep spawns a ``negative spiral'' of emotional instability, risky behavior and poor decision making. None of this sounds promising.
Most experts agree that teens need nine to 10 hours of sleep a day. One of the big problems is that teenagers' bodies don't start producing the sleep hormone melatonin until around 1 a.m. while adults start around 10 p.m. School begins at 7:40 a.m. Carskadon writes that she has found that about 50 percent of students are ``pathologically sleepy'' at 8:30 a.m. Sound familiar?
Now I understand why my first classes are sluggish and require me to ``keep'' students awake. In a recent poll that I conducted, I found that all students sleep in school with the average time being one hour per day. Nearly 100 percent of students said they are in bed by midnight or later with the majority going to be around 1 a.m. Given that nearly all students rise around 6 a.m., the numbers show Korean teens are getting half the agreed upon hours of sleep at night.
In the July 31 issue of London Review of Books, the author Jenny Diski pays homage to the absurdity of sleeping and waking: ``Sleep is such a dangerous place to go from consciousness: Who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they're not looking?'' Yet, her initial assault is a ruse as she reveals in her third paragraph: ``Inexpert as I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep.'' With that she proceeds to explain her relationship with sleep ― should I call it a love affair? ― and takes us to the finest places of the process ― ``the hinterland'' and ``hypnopompia'' or in simpler terms, when we enter and exit sleep in a sort of ``drift.''
Diski reminded me of the many students I've come across who have answered ``sleep'' when I asked them that they liked to do. Because so many students are perpetually deprived of that which they pine for while they burn the candle at both ends, they have it always on their minds. And the ``drifting'' Diski speaks of is a part of every students day. She recalls a time when she was up for 36 hour straight with a fit of insomnia then writes, ``I must have fallen asleep eventually, later that night or day or whenever it was, because I haven't been awake ever since…'' Sound familiar?
So I imagine it is with bewilderment and disbelief that adolescents and Diski would read ``Restless'' in the Sept. 18 edition of The Economist, which introduces the reader to two Italians in their 50s who never sleep due to a neurodegenerative disease called multiple system atrophy. The report is based on research publish in the journal Sleep Medicine.
There's a plethora of medical jargon in the report, but to put it somewhat simply the patients' brains appear to be undergoing wakefulness, REM sleep and non-REM sleep at the same time or to be rapidly switching between the three. Amazingly, the patients have shown no loss of intellectual capacity. Consequently, it is believed that the patients' brains still perform memory consolidation. Moreover, this apparently lends credence to a fairly nascent idea that sleep and wakefulness may mingle more than we know. As the article says, ``In other words, the human brain can be awake and asleep at the same time.'' Yet, the uncertainty of it is as certain as anything. Maybe, ends the article, ``sleep is not necessary for memory after all.''
Thus I leave you perhaps more confused then when you began. What if we found a way to eliminate the sleep that consumes 30 percent of our lives? What if we could genetically manipulate humans so sleep was no longer necessary? I wouldn't have to fret about turning off those lights and students wouldn't need to worry about sleep deprivation. Not to mention all the more time we'd have on our hands. The world would be a better, albeit busier place. Or would it? What about those cherished moments Diski showers with adoration, those lovely naps on a rainy day, sleeping in on a Sunday, drifting back to sleep as a winter wind howls outside?
I don't know about you, but when I crawl into bed tonight I'm gonna squeeze my pillow a little tighter.
The writer has been teaching English at Daewon Foreign Language High School for the past five years. He can be reached at jmrseoul@hotmail.com.