Drowsiness is red alert...but sleep deprivation is torture

Sleep and Dreams is legendary for its innovative policy of giving out extra credit to students who sleep during lecture. I was privileged to be one of those people today - I came into lecture sleepy, and within five minutes, I was out cold. But you can't say I didn't plan ahead! Dr. Dement allocates a special "sleeping section" for students who want to sleep unharrassed, and although I always sit in that section anyway because I sometimes feel like I could fall asleep at any moment, I made sure sure to sit in the back of the sleep section today to get a good 50 minutes of shut-eye.

So apparently the policy about not disturbing sleepers isn't really set in stone. I heard from a friend after the class that Dr. Dement somehow spotted me (the man has incredibly good vision, I was sitting in the back of a big auditorium...) and asked the class if I should be woken up - and of course, being the sadists that they are, the class decided to screw with me. Dr. Dement asked me what the last thing I remembered was, and I honestly had no idea...I remembered that the topic of the lecture was "dreams", but can't recall much that he said. I think a psychoanalyst (didn't know they still existed) is giving a guest lecture on Friday. And lucid dreaming is cool. And the class laughed awkwardly when Dr. Dement talked about, to put it colloquially, "morning wood".

But although drowsiness may in fact be red alert, sleep deprivation is torture. Amnesty International says so. Apparently the KGB liked to use sleep deprivation to force information from its captives - a very convincing technique, I'm sure. The Israeli prime minister, once a victim of KGB sleep-deprivation techniques, went so far as to say, "In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it." Pretty intense, right? And here I am complaining about not being allowed to sleep through a class.