Technology has proven repeatedly that it can completely change our daily lives. What about our overnight lives?
Currently, there are many sleep-oriented devices that you can use, for example, if a pandemic panic forbids sleep at night. You can put a white noise device on your bedside so that you can easily fall asleep, you can use a SAD light (a device that emits light waves used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as 'winter depression') to wake up in the morning, and not to mention dozens of apps and devices that you can use to measure and improve your sleep quality. As a matter of fact, it's also normal that sci-fi movies and stories are constantly looking for new ways to rest better or use the hours we spend sleeping more efficiently.
Anyway, we're all sleeping, and it doesn't look like it's going to change in the future. So let's take a look at the bedrooms of the future in sci-fi works.
First, it should be said that according to many works of science fiction, we will sleep much longer in the future, for decades, perhaps even centuries. This is the theory behind "Frozen sleep,"called Cryosleep, which aims to freeze the human body and stop vital activities for long enough periods to travel through the vast depths of space.
The concept of frozen sleep comes across in many sci-fi films, from alien to Avatar, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Event Horizon. In particular, the moment of waking from sleep has even become a sci-fi cliché: The Waking crew get up with sleep-spur eyes and slowly try to understand their situation by checking their bodies. Frozen sleep is a handy trick for directors because it gives a relatively logical sense of space travel, and on the one hand, the characters say, "how long have I been sleeping?"when looking for answers to the question, the film offers the audience the opportunity to explain itself.
Long-term drowsiness is also scientifically possible; dozens of animal species that slow down their metabolism by hibernating are examples of this. So can the same be applied to humans? This question, which is still being sought for an answer, is an active topic of scientific research. For example, says Associate Professor Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, a neurologist at Oxford University who is also involved in research into hibernation for humans with the European Space Agency:
"In theory, there are no barriers that prevent people from hibernating. However, we have not yet found a reliable and healthy way to hibernate for humans."
One of the most important questions, the answer of which is unknown, is what effects such a long-term sleep will have on the brain. In animals, hibernation is different from normal sleep, which means that a person who spends his journey through the cosmic void sleeping can actually wake up suffering from sleep deprivation.
And, of course, there is a situation where such' sleep ' is not a very safe method of travel. In 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien 3, space travelers are killed in their beds (or rather, in their "pod"). In the same way, Alien: Covenant feeds a big movie star in his sleep before he can show himself yet.
No More Sleep
Currently, people open records of conversations in languages they want to learn at their bedside to brainwash their own sleep, or encouraging conversations to lose weight. The science fiction extensions of this phenomenon are revealed in Aldous Huxley's famous novel Brave New World, which has recently been adapted for television: children are trained in their sleep by a technique called hypnopedia. Of course, it's a dystopian sci-fi nightmare, so this technique is used to tool children for evil purposes. On the other hand, we see that the same technique is used to introduce advertising into Dreams in the animated series Futurama and the comic book Transmetropolitan.
Fortunately, these dark scenarios are unlikely to happen, because the recordings that are listened to in sleep are not very permanent in the brain. Vyazovskiy says:
"Our brain is remarkably aware of what happens around us while we sleep. But at this time, what was learned is also forgotten so quickly."
As time management, one expects science fiction to find different ways to better evaluate the time we have "wasted" with sleep. In another comic, Judge Dredd, the robotic law forces of the future use special machines to instantly rest and regenerate so that they can quickly return to the streets and continue to break batons above the nation. In the 2015 Doctor Who episode Sleep No More, which takes its name from the oft-quoted famous Shakespearean play Macbeth, sleep-shortening Morpheus pods could shorten a long and relaxing night's sleep and fit into a few minutes. Of course, since it's a Doctor who episode, it turns out that the devices are actually linked to monstrous creatures formed from sleeping dust that form on the edges of our eyes when we sleep.
A much more rational way to avoid the quilt, Ian M. It is practiced by captain Kraiklyn, the space pirate in banks's novel Consider Phlebas. The captain, who can put both halves of his brain to sleep separately, is able to stay awake all the time so that no one can catch him in his sleep. The bad part of this is that his personality changes depending on which one of his left brain and right brain is used.
In fact, in general, we see that sleep-suppressing methods are very rarely used in speculative fiction. Sleep can be a very basic human requirement that science fiction writers avoid tampering with. However, this does not prevent us from using apps and sleep tracking systems to improve our sleep quality.
Sleep To The Future
In the 1956 classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and its eerie 1978 remake), the apocalypse comes in a form of sleep. As humans fall asleep, they are replaced by extraterrestrials, known as pod humans. A notable detail is that director Don Siegel actually wanted to name the film No More Sleep.
Maybe A Dream
Nightmares are also the focus of countless stories. However, if we want to find a story about sleep quality, we need to look at the bed of work. In Night Terrors, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Crew of the Enterprise were losing the REM phase in their sleep. REM, as it is known, is the part of sleep that is directly related to learning and memory. The crew loses their ability to focus, begins to hallucinate, and when they are on the verge of going crazy, things start to get out of hand.
Dreams make up most of the REM phase. In fact, Star Trek and many other sci-fi works have many other parts about dreams. For example, who can forget the Crazy Red Room in Twin Peaks or the layer-by-layer dreams in Inception? It is also necessary to remember the famous unicorn dream in Blade Runner at this point, because fans of the film have been arguing for many years that this dream means that Rick Deckard could be an android.
In real life, we see dreams as the source of the stories we tell. Bram Stoker as Dracula, Mary Shelley as Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson as Dr. With Jekyll and Mr. They wrote Hyde after he woke up from his scary dreams. The Terminator was inspired by a dream in which James Cameron saw a skeleton walking among the flames. Neil Gaiman and H.P. We know that writers like Lovecraft say they are inspired by their dreams.
However, perhaps it is best to keep our sleep and awake lives separate from each other. Vyazovskiy says:
"If we could remember as much as we could remember what we experienced when we were awake, what we saw in our sleep, in our dreams, the consequences would be catastrophic. In the past, we could not distinguish between what we really lived and what we dreamed."
A lot of what science fiction dreamed of became reality over time. Still, sleep is a phenomenon so central to being human that it has largely resisted the technological advances that have taken over other parts of our lives to this day. Finally, Vyazovskiy says about frozen sleep pods, sleeping machines and ads seen in dreams:
"For these developments to become a reality, we have long and difficult paths ahead. There are tons of things about the human brain, dreams, and memory that we still don't understand, and there's no way we can figure them out."