[Basic] Advantage of the Week (#42): Doesn't Sleep, Less Sleep

[kreios]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

The myth that you can't see colors in your dreams (I think this sprang up around the eras of common black and white film and black and white television being ubiquitous), the myth that you can't feel pain in your dreams so you should try to pinch yourself to make sure (monstrously false), the myth that you can't safely urinate in a dream without it also happening to your sleeping body in bed...

What however works (at least from personal experience) is trying to hold your nose shut, such that you no longer can breathe through it. Since, in the real world, you obviously aren't doing that, you notice it as breathing through a shut nose. Quite an interesting feeling, in my experience, and a certain sign that you're dreaming.


As for the topic, I often give characters less sleep. One of my last characters, in a sadly very quickly ending AtE game, was a scavenger with four levels of less sleep. Meant that he could go scouting while the rest of the party was resting, and made for a few very entertaining descriptions of going to bed last and being up first.

[wellspring]

This is another one of those advantages that depends heavily on the campaign. With some GMs it will never come up. With others, it's an incredible hack for the per-day action economy.

A day is usually split into three parts. 1/3 is spent on professional/adventuring activities. 1/3 is spent on leisure and taking care of personal necessities; you can rob from this to work overtime but your productivity goes way down. 1/3 is spent asleep; again overtime is possible but has a strong impact on fatigue.

So given that you really have eight sustainable hours per day, extra hours permanently bought away from sleep is a major boost to your working hours, even if you rule that the extra time has to be split evenly with your leisure time.

Where the issue comes up is that most campaigns that I've been in haven't been so intent on micro-accounting for every minute. Sure you get more done in a day, but you get as much on-camera time as the other PCs and so you don't actually benefit.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Celti

My dreams generally include the full sensorium — vivid colours (some of which may or may not exist in nature), rich sound, full smells, touch all of mundane or pleasing or painful, and more esoteric senses most people don't think of *— have you ever been dizzy in a dream? How's your proprioception in the the world through the looking-glass? Essentially, other than the oddties of dreams impacting what they see, my senses are fully as engaged in dreams as in life.

I'll try to make only this one last comment on the thread drift;
soooooo jelly.
;)

[Flyndaran]

Less Sleep is somewhat necessary to allow the Batman/Buffy/etc. trope of dual life characters. How else are they supposed to "playboy" or attend school during the day and fight evil at night?
For no logical reason, that's always been one of my biggest stumbling blocks to such characters. Super powers, super luck, super talent and skill, okay. But never needing to sleep? That's silly.

[whswhs]

Curiously, I had a dream this morning that was à propos. I was at my old corporate job, and a co-worker had brought me a set of proofs of a paper that I had edited, and that had problems. And I was comparing the proofs with the edited manuscript. And in the dream, I would look at the manuscript, and see something, and then look at the proofs, and see something different, but when I looked back at the manuscript, I couldn't find those words again; they had changed into something else. I suspect that my brain had said, "put text here," but hadn't bothered to record the specific words, because normally in a dream all you need is the impression that there's text there.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by wellspring

Where the issue comes up is that most campaigns that I've been in haven't been so intent on micro-accounting for every minute. Sure you get more done in a day, but you get as much on-camera time as the other PCs and so you don't actually benefit.

Not entirely true.

I've been in campaigns using Study Time, where of course this is useful. University would be very different if people could buy this off-the-shelf for the period of their education. People try, but coffee just isn't the same.

More relevant to adventurers: FP loss from sleep deprivation. Travelling from point A to Point Z, and points B through Y are in hostile territory? You're probably going to post guard shifts. If you only camp for 8 hours, everyone on guard duty that night doesn't have enough sleep. If you camp for 12 hours, with three shifts of 4 hours, the first and last shift can try to get 8 hours of sleep, but the guy on the middle shift is sort of fubar.
Everyone gets woken up if there's a disturbance or fight.
This causes FP loss that can't be regained until you get a good nights sleep... which you can't if you keep not getting 8 hours sleep.

I have sleep apnea. This means I don't really sleep without machine assistance; in my "natural" state I can doze, and I can suffocate. I've been like this as a baby (my poor mother - I held my breath in my sleep, parental nightmares!) I got by via "sleeping" 10-14 hours a day whenever given a chance, but I really was a bit crazy all the time.
I didn't know what good sleep was until I got my machine this past year. It makes grueling sleep deprivation for adventurers a very visceral thing for me.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I suspect that my brain had said, "put text here," but hadn't bothered to record the specific words, because normally in a dream all you need is the impression that there's text there.

Not quite.

What happens is that the portion of the brain that handles recognizing and comprehending the written word is split. Part of it turns off when you sleep, the part that actually handles assigning specific meaning to specific words. However the part(s) that actually recognize what words are (ie that they are words and a form of communication, not just random lines, or say art) is still active. So if the dream needs printed words, you get recognizable words, but the meaning is almost always out of whack, and the part of the brain that would keep them "separate and distinct" (and bother remembering individual words and their order) is asleep, so every time you look at a page again it will have changed the words... but not always the meaning.

I've read whole books in my dreams.... and since I used to occasionally* confuse dreams with reality**, I sometimes will "misremember" books I've read. Because I either "reread" it in a dream, or I never really read it in the first place, I just made up the story in a dream.


* When I was younger (teens to mid-twenties) I frequently had very vivid realistic dreams that I'd completely remember upon waking and think had occurred (as in the events 'happened yesterday" or "a few days ago"). Usually something would occur that would trigger the realization that it was just a dream, like realizing the movie I saw wasn't even out yet, or the test i took hadn't happened yet, or such.

** I once dreamed two whole weeks of life. So very realistic that when I woke up I thought two weeks had passed. It took me a few days to get over the idea that there wasn't some massive prank going on and to fully comprehend that those two weeks never actually occurred...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

However the part(s) that actually recognize what words are (ie that they are words and a form of communication, not just random lines, or say art) is still active. So if the dream needs printed words, you get recognizable words, but the meaning is almost always out of whack, and the part of the brain that would keep them "separate and distinct" (and bother remembering individual words and their order) is asleep, so every time you look at a page again it will have changed the words.

Isn't that what I said?

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I have sleep apnea. This means I don't really sleep without machine assistance; in my "natural" state I can doze, and I can suffocate. I've been like this as a baby (my poor mother - I held my breath in my sleep, parental nightmares!) I got by via "sleeping" 10-14 hours a day whenever given a chance, but I really was a bit crazy all the time.
I didn't know what good sleep was until I got my machine this past year. It makes grueling sleep deprivation for adventurers a very visceral thing for me.

Inversely I'm pretty much the opposite.

Until the last year two years I was a solid six hours a night man. Unless I really worked hard to exhaust myself, I never needed more than 6 hours of sleep to feel right as rain, and often ran on a mere 4 hours with a couple of days a week getting back to my full 6 (in High School especially). 8 hours for the rare week that I ran light (less than 6) every single night, but even then, more than 8 hours and I'd feel worse than if I just went completely without sleep.

But now? Well... read on:

I'm a very light sleeper. I can hear a cat walking across carpeting and if necessary* will wake up**. These last two years I've had a pair of kittens (2 year old cats now) that are absolute pains in my buttocks. They are very needy pants and will wake me up every half hour or so (because they are "attention starved"***) starting about 4-5 am and going to 9 am (when they go back to sleep). I work most nights from 5pm to 1am. So... it's been hell.

I tend to go to sleep somewhere between 3 and 4 and would like to just get up at say 10am... but... I end up finally being able to fitfully**** sleep from say 10ish until 2pm. I can pretty well describe the effects of long term sleep loss.

It ain't pretty.


* I had a cat years ago that would chew and pull your hair while you slept. So I learned to wake up when ever he walked into my room.

** At least enough to cover my head with a sheet. Then when he was denied his midnight hair snack, I'd pet him for a minute and he'd curl up next to my feet and I'd go back to sleep. This didn't happen every night, just once or twice a week, so it never really bothered me.

*** By which I mean they get all the attention they want when I'm home and awake, but they're both still very "Oh noes, I'm awake and everyone else is asleep, how will I ever amuse myself? I know, I'll go wake up the human, he always pets me." (Well, it's either that or listen to him cry incessantly until I do)

**** Being a light sleeper (and a bit of an insomniac), once I've been disturbed enough I have trouble sleeping soundly. Everything wakes me up. No everything. Every noise, even noises I'd normally ignore. Having to roll over wakes me up. The distant low rumble of the air conditioner kicking on.
It's hellish.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Isn't that what I said?

Kinda, basically, but with less words and description.