Reducing Sleep Duration

Bernard Werber [School of Sleep] “On average, we spend twenty-five years of our lives asleep, and yet we do not know how to control the quality and duration of our sleep. True deep sleep, which restores strength, lasts only one hour during the night; it is divided into fifteen-minute periods and returns, like the refrain of a song, every hour and a half. Sometimes people sleep ten hours in a row without ever finding this deep sleep, and wake up after ten hours completely exhausted. But if we knew how to calculate the time of deep sleep, we could sleep only one hour a day and fully recover during those sixty minutes. How can this be done in practice? One must be able to determine one's sleep cycles. To do this, it is enough to record precisely, minute by minute, the time when a slight feeling of fatigue appears (usually this happens around six in the evening), remembering that it will return every hour and a half. It is at these moments that the train of deep sleep passes. If one goes to bed exactly at this time and forces oneself to wake up after three hours (with the help of an alarm clock, for example), one can gradually teach the brain to compress the sleep phase and leave only the necessary part of it. In this way one can rest wonderfully in a very short time and wake up in excellent shape. Undoubtedly, someday children will be taught to control their sleep in schools.” Is this possible? In that case, what about melatonin, for example, which is produced mainly during sleep?