Hack This: Hack Your Sleep

Hack This is Motherboard’s weekly guide to doing technology better.

Sleep is losing control for a period of time, and I don’t like that. I don’t know what kind of shit my brain is going to throw at me for dreams—zombies? Oh, that’s original—I can’t wake up on time without an alarm, and I can barely fall asleep without booze or Benedryl. I think I might be a wreck. So, for today’s edition of Hack This, let’s look at some neat ways you can truly own that, what, third of your life you spend asleep?

Lucid dreaming

The holy grail: being awake, or aware, during your dreams. There’s like an entire internet about this, but let’s try to keep it simple, or keep it to broad concepts.

First, pay way more attention to your dreams. Obsess about them. Keep a dream journal and write down absolutely everything you can strain yourself into remembering. Get familiar with the patterns, the things that occur again and again. You’ll start to develop your own dream language (is the idea).

Check constantly to see if you’re dreaming during the day. Make it a habit and after a while you’ll start doing the same checks in your dreams. It could be something stupid like flipping a light switch to see if it works normally, or reading something to make sure it’s “normal.”

Take care when waking up. Wake slowly and, when you first wake up, keep still and keep your eyes closed. Remember backwards from the first dream piece you remember, writing every piece down. Add to this by setting alarms during the night at few hour intervals, waking up every time and jotting down, and then keeping yourself up for a while while just sort of mentally drifting.

That’s sort of the nut of it: pay way more attention both to reality and your dreams, and try and trick your sleep cycles into giving more memories up. The link above will take you through a much deeper, more detailed route that’s also kinda goofy. This WikiHow seems pretty good and to-the-point as well.

Waking Up

Holy what, I hate waking up. What’s more, my dog even hates waking up, so I can’t even count on being barked at in the morning. We just stare at each other like fuck, why?

One easy thing is writing down when you wake up each day. Not when you peel yourself out of bed, but when you wake up wake up. Compare that time to what you ate—or drank—the day before. How bad did it screw around with your wake up time? How did it compare to your alarm clock time? You’ll find out you have a normal-ish wakeup time and can play off of that. Like, if it’s way different than your alarm time, you probably need to change something.

Eat an awesome breakfast. Not only does it reset your body’s clock in the best way, it gives you some incentive for being in the world and not comfortable and warm in bed.

Wake up to a song, like this one.

Going to sleep

• Don’t eat before bed. This is bad for all kinds of reasons.

• Don’t drug. It’s a vicious cycle.

• This guy says take an ice bath. I say take a relaxing and comfortable shower or bath.

• Melatonin. It works only for casual trouble falling asleep and is arguably as much of a drug as anything else but, hey, it’s in a different aisle at CVS.

• Get up at dawn. You know this one: get up way too early and you’ll drop off real easy, and getting up the next day at your normal time will seem like nothing in comparison.

• Turn on a fan. Goddamn, I love sleeping with a fan. I don’t know how people do it otherwise.

• Don’t be an alcoholic. It’s a viscous cycle.

• Bone zone, as if it needs being said.

Reach for this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.