Interesting that no one knows why we sleep. It is a great mystery to those who are unfamiliar with the body's esoteric energies.

How much sleep you naturally need depends on strength and harmony of your subtle energy fields.

Skimping on the sleep, eating crap foods, breathing shallow do not allow you to replenish and harmonize your bioenergy. Sickness results.

If you eat normal american foods, you'll be in desperate need of more sleep. Running an energy deficit overtime, of course, results in dire sickness and early death.

If you meditate for even 30 minutes, you'll need a few hours less sleep. Nootropic drugs naturally and healthfully decrease the need for sleep by fascilitating energy flow. Likewise, if you do qigong, you'll find that you need less sleep.

And my favorite anecodte--in some Buddhist monasteries, sleep is optional. They are so subtly energetic with all of their meditation, diet, breathing, and energy cultivation/circultation that they just don't feel the need to sleep.

So, if you want to sleep less *and* remain healthy, you must attend to your bioenergy. Otherwise, it just isn't worth it.

I slept 10 or so hours a day my freshman year. This was before I got into any sort of diet/meditation stuff. I had a crap diet, partied often, and was quite energetically depressed. Fast forward three years. I naturally wake up after 7 hours. It just happens without effort. If I throw in some sort of cultivation that day, i.e. delta meditation, biocircuits, dash of ginseng, piracetam n'such, then I find myself waking up after about 5 hours.

My 'feel the power' posts chronicle a time when I went for TWO WEEKS on just 3 hours of delta meditation--WITH NO SLEEP. This was a great learning experience that solidified my own sleep theories, but ultimately unsustainable. Plus you have to find tons of stuff to take up all that extra time!

Wiliam Dennet wrote a great book on sleep called, "The Promise of Sleep". He's the guy who discovered REM sleep in the 50's and probably is the foremost sleep researcher in the world. He describes people that naturally, genetically almost, require 1 hour of sleep a day. He could find NO scientific reason for this, so he wrote it off to genetics. Whereas I would love to have these people analyzed by aura readers or chi measuring devices.

Interestingly, you'll also find that geniuses tend to have irregular sleeping patterns--which I feel may actually be RESPONSIBLE for their genius in the first place. Edison slept 4 hours and had 2 45 min theta meditations. Einstein slept 12 hours a day, probably had tons of brain-building REM sleep. Leonardo Da Vinci also had a really odd nap thing going.

Rise and shine.