The 1000 Day Holiday

Looks to be a very good article on many aspects of sleep:

Intro
The fundamental truths of sleep are not difficult to master: one sleeps when one is tired — mostly at night—and awakens the next day usually feeling rested and refreshed.

So why put together an Insight on a topic that seems so straightforward?

Although it is often true in biology that things are more complex than they seem at first glance, it is especially accurate for sleep. This became apparent about 50 years ago with the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is a sleep state marked by intense brain activity, rapid bursts of eye movement and vivid dreaming. The high level of brain activity during REM sleep created a serious challenge to the prevailing dogma — that we sleep simply to provide rest — and raised a host of largely unanswered questions about the function of sleep.

Intuition also fails us when considering other aspects of sleep — namely that ‘drifting off to sleep’ is a slow process and that sleep and wake are completely separate states. On the contrary, the act of switching from being awake to sleeping can be extremely rapid, an observation that carries significant public health implications. And patients with various sleep disorders can exist in curious states that combine aspects of both sleep and wakefulness, indicating that the two are not always mutually exclusive.

That so many big questions in sleep research remain unanswered makes it a fascinating field to follow. This Insight highlights much of that excitement with a diverse collection of articles.

Sleep : Insight : Nature

Im Not Crazy!
interesting quote from article:

The disorders of arousal are the most impressive and most common of the NREM sleep parasomnias. These share common features. They tend to arise from slow-wave sleep (stages 3 and 4 of NREM sleep) and therefore usually occur during the first third of the sleep cycle (and rarely during naps). They are common in childhood, usually decreasing in frequency with increasing age43, 44.

Disorders of arousal may be triggered by febrile illness, alcohol, previous sleep deprivation, physical activity, emotional stress or medications. Such precipitants should be thought of as triggering events in susceptible individuals and not the cause. Persistence of these behaviours beyond childhood or their development in adulthood has erroneously been taken as an indication of underlying psychopathology. Careful clinical evaluations of patients with disorders of arousal have dispelled the myth that these conditions are the manifestation of significant underlying psychiatric or psychological problems45, 46, 47.

Disorders of arousal occur on a broad spectrum ranging from confusional arousals, through somnambulism (sleep walking) to sleep terrors. Some take the form of ‘specialized’ behaviours such as sleep-related eating and sleep-related sexual activity