While most of you are dreaming about flying, LAist is awake putting together your favorite web site for you. In fact last night we didn't get to sleep until 9am, only to get back up at 1pm as our buddy called us to offer to take us to the Laker game tonight.

LAist believes that you can sleep when you're dead. But because our friends always give us a hard time about our weird sleeping habits we were fascinated by a list of 40 Facts put out by the National Sleep Research Project.

These facts totally interested us:

- Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you're sleep deprived. The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you're still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy by day.

- REM sleep occurs in bursts totaling about 2 hours a night, usually beginning about 90 minutes after falling asleep.

- Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock.

- British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers' body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hrs. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles project a ring of bright white light (with a spectrum identical to a sunrise) around the edge of soldiers' retinas, fooling them into thinking they have just woken up. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo.

photo by Bryan F