Why do we sleep?
Looking back, it was a usual night. During the day I had been part of the team evaluating a couple of design tools for object oriented design. The evaluation was proceeding smoothly and it was one of those days when life seemed to be moving slowly and suddenly there was plenty of time to look into the where my life stood in the road to the future. It was not a road to perdition but it was hazy and the path forward was not clear.
It was a long time since I had seen some unusual dreams, dreams filled with creativity that presented exciting scenarios that rarely happen in our day-to-day life. Sometimes, dreams help you achieve the impossible, though it only happens in dreams. I have often felt that I am at my best whenever I have such dreams. It had been a long time and life was at its lowest ebb and then this dream happened.
Life, as a whole, presents a lot of perplexing questions. There must be some reason, I thought, as to why we humans need to sleep everyday. The very purpose of sleeping daily! It could have been weekly or there could have been some other recharge mechanism. But why sleep? I thought to myself, I sleep for about 8 hours a day. If I could use those 8 hours for some other activity, then would my life have been different? Would the world be a different place? Probably there could be some ways of achieving the impossible. 1000 years ago, no one would have even imagined about the various technological gadgets that we take it for granted as part of our daily life.
As I kept wondering about the need for sleep, I began to realize that my body was not a single piece of human body. It was abnormal or probably it was the way all humans were. My body was made up of various objects and I could see that classes defined these objects and the classes were associated using UML style relationships. It was definitely not a comfortable feeling. I had known myself as being represented by a single framework made up of skeleton and various muscles and organs and covered by a single lining of skin that made the entire body look like a single component. The realization of the new representation of my body gave me a worrying feeling. I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to assemble all the components and deploy it as a single unit. But I just didn’t know how to do it. Was there a tool? Was there a physician who could assemble it? If yes, how do I find the tool or the physician? Do others also experience the same? I was deeply into finding ways to see myself as a single unit of representation. Then this thought came to my mind. Probably this is the correct representation of the human body. And that could be the reason why we sleep. When we sleep, the body was getting un-deployed and necessary corrections and fine-tuning was being done to the components and by the time we are through with the ritual of sleeping, the components get deployed again. That is why we need to sleep daily as the human components are not scalable beyond a day without loosing performance. The human system probably needs to get restarted once a day so that it does not loose its performance.
A strange feeling came to my mind. I wanted to view the objects and their classes and their relationships so that I could study the architecture of the body. Even though I had realized the same, I couldn’t see it. In an attempt to see the classes of my body, I opened my eyes to view what could be the best architecture ever known for mankind. As I opened my eyes, I was getting out of my sleep and the components were getting deployed and the system was restarting. My eyes were wide open and the world was at it was earlier. My body was still a single unit of human body. The components were not visible. I was confused whether what I had seen was just a dream or the realization of the unknown!
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