Why do we sleep

- You’re so silly… If we didn’t sleep, we’d eventually drop dead. Or, worse, we’d never dream.
- Are you sure you’ll keep this ironic smile all the way through the end of this conversation?
- I bet I will.
- Let’s see, then… They say that we sleep in order to recover the natural resources burried in our bodies. Meanwhile, the immortal soul minds its own business, dreaming, getting scared, hanging around our bodies, being happy and whatever it feels like doing.
- Of course.
- But the body doesn’t need breaks. Let’s think about muscles.
- Let’s think.
- When I move my fingers to type these lines, in the muscles I have in my hands and phalange  there occur some chemical events: the links between some substances containing calcium are breaking, and some energy is released. But this is a chemical process. Well, in fact it’s a biochemical process. But biochemical processes don’t get tired. So the body
couldn’t possibly get tired.
- You don’t convince me.
- Well, let’s talk about dreams. While sleeping, the video board of your body kepps running. And it generates random images.
- What about the slow sleep?
- It keeps running even during the slow sleep. It’s been proven, for a few decades now, that dreams have nothing to do with the paradoxical sleep.
- Er…
- So the sleep isn’t a hardware issue.
- It appears so.
- Then it must be a software issue.
- Or not.
- Yes, but then we should introduce in our discussion another element.
- What element?
- For instance a sleep virus, nested in our genotype.
- Well, let’s introduce it.
- Wait a moment, now we’re talking about the legitimate operating system. Given that the body’s video board keeps running during the reason’s sleep, it appears that the sleep is due to the inability of the operating system to process all the data sent by senses.
- It’s still not convincing.
- It is, if we think that not all the available data are processed. Humans’ HD is about 10GB. It stores tiny bits of information which are used to complete the data computed by the processor. Actually these data aren’t completed. When the senses detect something familiar, the information flux simply stops, and the processor computed older data, cached on the HD, so it saved the system’s resources.
- How comes?
- You’ll see in the image I’ll post by this text.
- And why is this happening?
- Because we lack attention and we’re superficial. Concentration is the ability to block this defect of the system (which doesn’t process all the information received and doesn’t follow all the consequences of an observation.
- This might be true for thennis players.
- It’s true for them, but it’s also true for commenters, for sailors, for anybody.
- But is the chronic lack of attention an inbuilt feature?
- Yes.
- Why so?
- Who knows, there might be a bug in the OS.
- What kind of bug?
- A hornet.
- So we have hornets in our heads.
- Yes.
- What avout the sleep virus?
- This is another possibility. Sleep could be the weaken state of another world. From this sleeping world, during the dream of an inhabitant (their dreams are actually our waking world), it came a sequence of code that got to crack the system’s protection and to integrate in our genotype. It must
have been easy enough, because the code was identical, but differently polarized. I mean reversely. And that was it.
- So we sleep either because we got hornets in our heads, or because we have some virus in our genes.
- Yeap.
- Er…
- OK, let’s do something useful.