Does anyone else think sleep is kinda interesting?

The dog is whimpering, her feet are trotting, she's huffing and puffing, twitching, her ears moving back and forth. What on earth is she dreaming about? "Chasing rabbits", we used to say about our old labrador. Probably was. And for this dog it's probably chasing balls. And the backyard cockies.

I just want to say that I think sleep is pretty bloody interesting. And so is dreaming. We don't really know why we do it, but we all do it, without question. We understand why we eat and drink, what's happening inside our digestive tract and how food creates energy. But what do we understand about the physiology of sleep? Not very much, is my guess.

It gets dark, we say goodnight to one another, lay down in our warm beds, across the country, the streets empty, the lights go out and it is quiet. We all sleep. And then the sun comes up and we all stir, climb out from under our blankets, rub our eyes and say 'good morning' and off we go again. Have any of you ever thought - say, in the middle of the night - that pretty much everyone in your town is lying still right now, asleep? Like we've all agreed that's what we do at night. Like robots; machines shutting down for regular maintenance.

Birds do it: my chickens put themselves to bed at twilight every night. If we disturb them (say to grab the eggs from underneath their warm bellies) they hardly stir, like they're totally away in another zone. Chimps make make fresh beds every night out of leaves and curl up in them. But do bees sleep? And sharks? Don't they need to keep moving to stay alive? Cows and horses sleep standing up - how does that work? Why don't their legs collapse under them?

And what's the go with anaesthetic? Why is it that you can sleep and realise time has passed, but if you go under an anaesthetic it's like you awoke an instant after you nodded off. The doctor says: "I'm going to count down from ten and you probably won't hear me when I get to one: ten, nine, eight, so how was that? The surgery all went really well, how are you feeling?". So what's different about sleeping under anaesthetic?

I know we need sleep, that we function like drunks without it, but what is our body actually doing? What's the process that's going on when we lay down, close our eyes and drift away? Are our cells repairing damage? Can they only do that when we stop most of our other functions? What is going on in there?

And dreams? Are we sorting the day's events into memory folders, is it just leftover random noise from our busy minds all folding together to make a weirdly disjointed stageshow in our heads?

So many questions and I don't really have any answers. If I could choose another career (and I've already swapped about a few times, so I think I probably won't), I'd definitely look into sleep. That is all.