This presentation was quite interesting to me because sleep is something that I have issues with regularly. I’ve done projects for this class and others relating both to sleep and dreams. One of the things that stuck out to me was the concept of sleeping being a way for your brain to process the days’ events. This is why often we end up dreaming about events that happen in our day to day lives but then end up twisting it to be a little more surrealistic. This is also probably why dreams are often thought to be profettic – given that our brain is processing the information that it has absorbed throughout the day, it can draw logical conclusions based on that data and then reality ends up coming to the same conclusion after some time. 

Dr. Pollock also spent some time talking about mental health and the stigma that often surrounds topics of mental health. He talked about how important it is to work on destigmatising such conditions so that people are able to talk about them and get the help that they might need. 

Beyond that there was also some history about sleep and how our sleep cycles have changed over time. Before the invention of light bulbs and consistent lighting, people would often follow the sun as their clock. I think I watched a YouTube video at some point that also talked about how people would often wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two to do some household chores or other things. This would basically break up the eight hour night into two four-hour periods. But if a lack of consistent sleep makes you want to nap during the day, it is also important to try and not nap longer than 30 minutes because at that point your brain will fall into deeper sleep and it might cause you to wake up grogier than before. If we look at a lot of animals in the animal kingdom, very few stick to monophasic sleep schedules – most either nap or just sleep for multiple shorter periods of time. All in all, it is important to get quality sleep.