WRITTEN BY RICHARD SEVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER

Information in this article, originally published June 8, was corrected June 9. A previous version of this story mistakenly pegged the annual number of fatigue-related traffic fatalities at about 100,000. That figure is actually the total number of pertinent police-reported highway car crashes each year. The National Sleep Foundation says those crashes result in 1,500 deaths and 71,000 injuries.
 

	In light sleep, you can be rousted easily. When you enter Stages 3 and 4 you're in deep sleep. Your brain waves slow, body temperature drops. You're conserving and regenerating. The last stage is REM, when your eyes zip back and forth, your brain is busy and you lose the ability to regulate your body temperature.

I TOSS MY overnight bag on the far side of the king-sized bed and check out the shower. I turn on 24-hour TV news so the low murmur of disaster can keep me company. About 20 minutes later, I hear David Browne check into his room down the hall. He and I have come to sleep. Actually, we're here to have people watch us sleep. Watch, in fact, our every sleeping move.

By 10 p.m., the four rooms at the Eastside Sleep Disorders Center are occupied. A friendly technician named Chris Ruth enters my room and adjusts wires attached to me from top to bottom. I have electrode pads on my scalp, near my eyes, on my jaw and on my leg. Bands are wrapped around my chest and stomach. A monitor clip pinches my left index finger.

Ruth steps a few paces back, observes his decorations and snaps a Polaroid — for my memorabilia collection, I suppose. The mass of wires makes me feel like the back of a sound system and look like an economy version of the Six Million Dollar Man.

Within a few minutes, I'm on my back and under covers. Ruth talks to me via intercom and I to him via the video camera above my bed. He tells me to blink several times. I do. He tells me to move my jaw, then one of my legs. I comply. Every move is registered not just by the camera, but on a graph scrolling from one side to the other on his control-station monitor.
 

As Britton Green sleeps using a breathing aid known as CPAP, technicians watch him through an infrared video camera above his sleep-lab bed. Sensors also monitor his vital signs.

We're all set. He returns to my room, turns off the light, says good night and closes the door. It strikes me as a preposterous expectation with all these wires around me, but sleep arrives in 19 minutes.

Browne, in another room of this Overlake Hospital Medical Center facility, falls asleep way before I do. Near as I can tell, he falls asleep immediately — blasting off snores that his sleep graph catches like a seismograph captures tremors.

That night, he and I are as different as two strangers can be. He's a big guy; I'm not. He's a software engineer; I live a year or two behind every technological curve. He's a power snorer; I don't even peep. His sleep breathing is labored; I hum right along. He may fall asleep and stay that way until morning, but it doesn't last him through the day. I'm a fussy sleeper, tap dancing between slumber and consciousness a dozen or so times a night.
 

	Patient Dennis Strawn gets wired up by technologist Alex Malloy at Eastside Sleep Disorders Center. Patients being observed are wired from scalp to leg.

Even our "sleep architecture" — the pattern of our heart rates, leg and eye movements, breathing, when and how long we dream, and the all-important "quality" of our sleep — bear almost no resemblance. In fact, there are all kinds of sleepers; narcoleptics, parasomniacs, inefficient sleepers, model sleepers, short sleepers and those who consider sleep a waste of time, to name a few.

Spend time in a sleep lab and you quickly learn that someone's sleep has a personality as idiosyncratic as his or hers in the waking world. The one thing that binds Browne and me is the realization that mysterious, misunderstood sleep has a huge say, not just in our every waking moment but in our daily and long-range health, and is as integral to fitness as nutrition and exercise.

That's the irony of not sleeping well. You are in a prime position to understand what most take for granted. Short-sleepers don't get it. Neither do those who purposely deprive themselves because they feel they have better things to do. Sleep professionals see it all the time.

TO MOST OF US, the waking world is like Earth, big, relevant and interesting. Sleep is a tiny, cold moon orbiting in the distance. Sleep experts have a far different view. They see two worlds of equal size that partially eclipse or overlap one another. In fact, they add a third overlapping sphere: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when we dream. They know the sleeping brain is at times as active as the waking one.
 

Eastside Sleep Disorders Center night technologists Alex Malloy, left, and David Ilagan each keep tabs on two sleepers during a typical shift. Night technicians, like most shift workers, don't sleep like babies.

Dr. Sarah Stolz, associate director of the Swedish Sleep Medicine Institute and a neurologist who treats a variety of cases, says some problem sleepers seem to inhabit those overlapping areas. In effect, the worlds collide.

Sleep problems for most of us are far subtler than the cases the sleep labs usually see, yet sleep deprivation is linked to a range of health problems — weight gain, diabetes, slow healing — as well as an estimated 100,000 traffic fatalities a year. Research suggests lack of sleep affects aging, concentration, moods and the inability or willingness to exercise.
 

			Animals Share Our Sleeping Quirks No way to know for sure, since you'd have to ask them, but animals enter the same or a similar state that humans do when we dream — Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, says the National Sleep Foundation. Dogs often bark and twitch their legs during periods of REM. Platypuses act out the process of killing crustacean prey. Horses spend 98 percent of their sleep time on their feet, making it tough for them to enter that deep state. This only proves that, like us, other animals have their own brand of sleep quantity, quality and rituals. Giraffes can do weeks without sleep. Brown bats will sleep nearly all day. The quality of sleep animals get varies on their level of security. The golden dormouse balances itself on a tree branch and wakes up at the slightest quiver. There is an African baboon that sleeps on its heels on top of a tree. That helps it stay alert to trouble, but while the posture makes it elusive, it also makes deep sleep elusive. A marine mammal has a unique way of sleeping, and some experts say it is the key to understanding our sleep. The dolphin, for instance, can swim and surface for air while sleeping. How can it be asleep and perform waking functions at the same time? One hemisphere of its brain is awake while the other gets shut-eye. There is much we don't know about sleep, let alone REM, the state in which we dream. At 50 years old, it's considered a newborn science. And what creature was instrumental in its discovery? The newborn. Researchers at the University of Chicago, led by Nathaniel Kleitman, set off in 1952 to understand why sleeping infants' eyes moved back and forth while other parts of their bodies were immobile. Dr. William Dement took it a step further. He began watching adult subjects sleep and waking them up as their eyes began moving rapidly. Most reported they had been dreaming. Dement introduced a method of measuring electrical reactions in the brain during sleep phases and found that REM is part of a sleep cycle that is generally 90 minutes long and replayed periodically throughout the night. From there, the study of REM and sleep burgeoned.

Stolz, along with the Swedish sleep center's medical director, Dr. Ralph Pascualy, and other experts promote exercise as a vital way to help induce sleep, as long as it is done consistently and, if possible, several hours before bedtime. Exercise's arousing effect raises body temperature, but that rise leads to a corresponding cooling five or six hours later, say experts. Timing exercise just right seems to aid those who have trouble falling asleep.

The trouble with that well-reasoned advice is the vicious cycle of poor sleep. The sleep-deprived don't possess the energy or inclination to exercise. Instead, they often gain weight, which leads to a series of other problems.

So why exactly do we sleep? We don't know. We just know we have to. Scientists understand that the body releases its greatest concentration of growth hormone, which helps our bodies repair damaged tissue, during sleep. Sleep-deprived lab animals suffer a breakdown in their vital functions.

Dr. James Krueger, a Washington State University professor and prominent sleep researcher, says you need look no further than evolution to know how badly we need shut-eye: "When you're in sleep, you're not eating or drinking or reproducing or protecting yourself. That's all negative from an evolutionary perspective. That tells you sleep has to have very important adaptive value."

Krueger's theory is that the need for sleep is tied to the flexibility of our brains and the rapidly changing connections between neurons. He believes sleep serves to preserve the brain's "synaptic superstructure" altered by each day's events, experiences, memories. In effect, you go to bed with a far different brain than you wake up with. A flexible brain is one of our major advantages, but it needs housekeeping, downloading, sorting, filing of memories and reordering of circuitry.

One of his studies drawing particular interest is about rat whiskers. Whiskers are important to rats, helping them sense the world. Researchers shave one side of the critter's face and watch the neuron organization of the cortex change and adapt. The neurons that normally receive signals from the whiskers and send messages back to the rat's muscles quickly reorganize. That's not the case with sleep-deprived rats.

Lack of sleep harms us, too, and not sleeping at all is disastrous. In 1959, a radio disc jockey went eight days without sleep to benefit charity. His filmed stunt, observed by two neurologists, chronicled effects of deprivation. By the third day his body temperature had dropped significantly. By the fourth, he was hallucinating. By the eighth he was walking and talking, but essentially asleep on his feet. He went home and slept for 24 hours. He soon lost his marriage, job, health and life.

IT WAS CLEAR from Browne's sleep architecture — his sleep activity chart — that his snoring was more than just annoying. It signaled sleep apnea. During his stay at the sleep center, 35 times an hour he'd stop breathing. The snores were like restarting gasps.

As in most sleep-apnea cases, he was tired during the day, even after what seemed to him a good night's sleep. That's why sleep doctors focus not just on the hours you sleep (seven to eight generally are recommended) but the quality of it. Pascualy says people who suffer apnea often don't spend enough time in deep, regenerating sleep and they don't get enough oxygen to their blood during sleep. Slowly, steadily, they sink into sleep debt; drowsiness starts to feel normal.
 

On his way to work, Eric Drop catches a nap aboard a ferry. With days busier and more hectic than ever, we're a nation of sleep debtors.

Browne went to a doctor because his wife had heard enough. Even though snoring sometimes is just snoring, his doctor had concern and referred him to the sleep lab for tests. The night I peacefully slumbered down the hall, Browne's snores registered frenzied activity, transforming straight graph lines into spurts of manic doodles. He returned to the clinic a few weeks later for a second test and was fitted with a breathing device known as a CPAP (SEE-pap). The mask fits over the nose and mouth and hooks to a system that helps feed additional oxygen to the sleeper. Technicians tinkered with the airflow, then watched him sleep.

Many people can't handle sleeping with a mask on all night, but Browne took right to it and figured a way to prop the mask hose on extra pillows so he could sleep on his side.
 

			States and stages of sleep Sleep has five stages. Stage 1 represents light sleep. Stage 2 is considered "medium." When you enter Stages 3 and 4, you're in deep sleep. Your brain waves slow. You're conserving and regenerating. The last stage is the dream state, REM, when your eyes zip back and forth and your brain is busy. Most people spend about half of sleep time in Stage 2. About 20 to 25 percent of our sleep is in REM, and we have three to five REM periods per sleep. Infants spend about half their sleep time in REM. Source: National Sleep Foundation

"I took it on vacation just after I got it," he told me. "My wife and I went on a cruise, and I was so go-go-go. I was prodding her to do this and that so much that she sort of got upset. She goes, 'What's got into you?' I told her, 'You did it to me.' "

This sounds like infomercial talk, but he didn't impress me as a man prone to hyperbole. Besides, it's true that people who finally sleep well get a certain "Superman" effect. Browne just knows the machine provides him a fresh start and energy enough to exercise, lose weight and lower his blood pressure. He weighed 240 when he went to the clinic. He still weighs 240, but his blood-pressure-medicine dose was cut in half as a result of improved sleep, and he lost one more excuse for failing to work out.

A few weeks later, I returned to the lab one morning to watch someone else take naps. He was being evaluated for possible narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that disrupts a person's sleep-wake cycle and causes him or her to fall asleep unexpectedly and at inopportune moments. This gentleman had spent the night at the lab, and now his daytime sleepiness was being monitored.
 

Alex Malloy adjusts Britton Green's air mask so no air leaks from it. Patients with sleep apnea can stop breathing dozens of times an hour as they sleep.

Once all the sensor checks were complete, the technician told him he could nap. He fell asleep within a minute. It was startling, but so was watching someone sleep. In the early days of REM research, people actually stood above a sleeper to watch for eye movements.

Standing behind the technician at the control panels, I could see the impulses and electricity emitting behind his body and brain. I could see how he was traveling from one level of sleep to another. He would be taking four or five naps, from 20 to 30 minutes at a time, before he could go home. Between each nap, he'd be kept up 90 minutes. If he entered dream state within any of these short naps, it would be a sign of possible narcolepsy because we generally don't reach such deep sleep in such a short time.

TENS OF MILLIONS of us have sleep troubles. Many of us don't know it. The severe cases can lead to breathing machines, medication or even surgery. Everyone recommends exercise as a solution, although studies are still being done to conclusively prove the link.

Plenty of entrepreneurs and companies are selling other solutions. One, a prolific spammer, markets a gadget that seems to wedge a person's mouth shut so he or she doesn't snore. I tried lotion from Quiet Nite and pills from iWellness. I also checked out fancy beds, sprays, aromatherapies, lullaby CDs, satin eye covers and the like. The cream and pills seemed to help one night, but not the next.
 

The Snoozer Versus the Snorer Breathing is closely monitored during a sleep study. The top image shows my shallow, regular breathing during sleep. The bottom shows David Browne's snoring.

Sometimes, the best therapy is common sense. When I told Dr. Michael Vitiello, a UW psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor and senior scientist with the Sleep Research Group, that I slept better in the lab than in my own bed, he didn't hesitate to suggest the potential culprit: how I treat sleep. He says we can solve many sleep problems ourselves and offered some tips:

• Keep, as much as possible, a regular sleep schedule. If your schedule varies wildly, your sleep quality will, too.

• Don't cheat. Depriving yourself during the week builds up a sleep debt you have to repay.

• Think about your environment. Is your bedroom dark enough, too warm, too cold? How is the airflow? How's the mattress? Too noisy?

• Avoid coffee in the late afternoon and stimulants like cigarettes. Don't drink alcohol to get to sleep, either. It screws up the sleep quality.

• Remember what the bed is for. "Use the bedroom for sex and sleep," Vitiello says. "Don't pay bills or watch TV there. Using the bed correctly will help train your body and brain to know what they are there for."

• If you read in bed and feel sleepy, it's time to turn off the light. Don't fight it so you can find out how the book ends.

• Listen to grandma. You heard about the warm milk? There is something to that. Like turkey, bananas and cheese, it contains sleep-inducing chemicals.

• Go to bed when you feel sleepy. If you lie there too long, get up, read or do something else relaxing. Then return and try again.

• Turn your clock around. "You don't need to see how long you've been up and unable to go to sleep. All you need it for is the alarm in the morning."

• Get good light exposure and exercise during the day.

• Take a warm bath or shower in the evening if you feel it helps.

• Some find a midafternoon nap helpful, but realize that you may take a bite out of your bedtime schedule.

Vitiello also told me to get real: No matter what you do or how well you feel, as you age, you're not going to sleep as well as you used to. "We're all aware we can't run the hundred-yard dash like we used to, but we seem to think it's in the Constitution that we are all guaranteed life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep."
 

	Deep sleep isn't just for the body. Washington State University researcher James Krueger is working on a theory that sleep is necessary to preserve the brain's "synaptic superstructure" altered by each day's events, experiences, memories. In effect, you go to bed with a far different brain than you wake up with.

THE BOTTOM LINE: It's about quality, not just quantity.

Sleep has five stages. The first is light sleep. Stage 2 is "medium." When you enter Stages 3 and 4 you're in deep sleep. Your brain waves slow, body temperature drops. You're conserving and regenerating. The last stage is REM, when your eyes zip back and forth and your brain is busy. While in REM, we lose our ability to regulate body temperature.

Most people spend about half of sleep time in Stage 2. About 20 to 25 percent of our sleep is in REM and we have three to five REM periods per sleep. Infants spend about half their sleep time in REM.

During dreams, your muscles are rendered lax. This is a measure of self-protection. If you're skydiving in your dream you don't want to be jumping off the bed in your sleep. But that doesn't happen for everyone. Some act out their dreams because their muscles stay active. Of the 84 classified sleep disorders, these are the most sensational and scariest cases.

Stolz showed me videos of a few Rapid Eye Movement Disorder cases. An elderly man got up on all fours and growled and swatted at something as if he were a tiger. Later he made a fist, turned to the side, and yelled, "Hey, watch it!" He threw a punch and fell out of bed. The technician ran into the room and asked him if he had been dreaming. He had gotten into a fight, he said, lost his balance and rolled down a hill. I watched a little boy climb to his knees and cry out in his sleep but ignore his consoling mother. He was on a different plane. He was having a sleepwalking spell.

Seeing that, and people kicking their legs against pads they've set up around their beds to prevent injury, fighting, running or acting like animals made me realize how fortunate I am and inspired renewed interest in my sleep report.

At first, I thought it was misleading because the night I spent there was serene by my standards. Then I realized it was not a test as much as a glimpse into one-third of my life.

The report told me I slept 5.7 hours and woke up, no matter how briefly, 24 times. I shifted between sleep stages 115 times and had only three REM periods. I found it amazing how my journey through sleep stages had drawn what looked like an urban skyline on the graph. I dipped and spiked and stair-stepped my way across sleep. I wasn't just out, I was moving. The report said I spent 37 percent of my night in Stage 2, only 6 percent in Stage 4, and less than 20 percent in REM. Ruth noted my sleep, overall, was "fragmented."

What's this mean? Essentially, I wasn't reaching deeply enough to find the truly regenerating sleep. Generally, when you wake up, you start the journey over. Many of us believe we sleep well, but we flit along the surface, waking momentarily and constantly without memory of it. That's one way you can sleep like a log and feel tired.

Teresa Garrestson, supervisor of the Eastside clinic, told me that unlike most sleepers who make it to the lab, I didn't have a serious, identifiable problem. But even with apnea, she said, there are many causes, levels, stressors, contributors.

Vitiello is right about sleep coming harder as I age, face medical challenges, carry more worries and try to squeeze more time out of the day. And he's right that I'm not alone. The sleep disorder clinic at Swedish, one of the nation's largest, sees about 4,500 patients at its labs each year. That's just one clinic, and then there are all of us who don't sleep well but either don't seek help or don't have problems that rise to a diagnosis level.

During downtime, I asked the overnight technicians there how they slept. Not one said well. In fact, few night-shift workers do.

But ever since I spoke to Vitiello and began showing sleep some respect, I've slept better. Then just the other night, with something weighing on my mind, I managed to grab only two hours of shut-eye. But, at least to me, there is something soothing, at least to me, in understanding how I sleep. It certainly beats lying awake at night and wondering.