Sleeping on muggy nights

You may have noticed that it's extremely hot at the moment. We're gearing up for the hottest January on record, and it's only getting worse.

Even when the sun goes down the heat remains like a bad smell. Opening a window only makes things worse as the screams of sleep-deprived parents and their miserable children drift through the night, tainting your dreams and clinging to the walls like second-hand smoke.

But why? Why does the heat deliver such wretched cheese-dreams? Why can't anyone in this city get some goddamn shut-eye?

According to Dr Karyn O'Keeffe of the Massey University Sleep/Wake Centre, it has everything to do with the body's thermoregulatory system – the means by which we unconsciously heat up or cool down.

"We have thermoregulatory responses that respond to heat and cold normally, and they are unable to be controlled as well during sleep," she says.

"We wake much more during the night, particularly during the first half of the night, and our sleep is a lot lighter. We end up being quite un-refreshed in the morning, and we're very aware of the fact that we've been waking during the night."

This is what accounts for the hellacious dreamscapes that seem to bleed halfway into the day. According to Dr O'Keeffee, we dream through every stage of sleep, but it's during the deepest REM stages that the most bizarre dreams take place.

"It's likely that you're remembering these dreams because you're awakening more regularly during your REM sleep and so there's more of a chance that you're aware of having had a strange dream than other nights."

So what can we do? Is there any way to survive the summer sans-Ambien? Is there a sleep-hack? The answer, says O'Keeffee, is: kind of.

"Our body needs to drop temperature by a few degrees in order to fall asleep. We can fool that process into happening by having a relatively cool bath or shower about half an hour before bed and have that cool-down process occur which will mimic what would normally happen as we cool down before we sleep.

"So it can help with sleep onset. Aside from that it's just the obvious things, like turning of your screens and turning on a fan."

This article was first posted at nzherald.co.nz and was republished here with permission.