While You Were Out
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My two documentaries on sleep and dreaming, where I spent multiple nights in a Montreal sleep laboratory having my head examined, among other nighttime adventures. I have been told these are among the most requested Ideas shows. I wrote them while researching The Head Trip. They began out of my total amazement that we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deep mysteries; the more you look into them the more mysterious – and variegated – they get. The idea here was to pair both advances in sleep science with first-person descriptions of different parts of the night – what is it like to fall asleep, to dream, to be in slow wave sleep, to wake in the night, to become lucid in a dream? It’s all here, including an admittedly bizarre dramatic reenactment of a lucid dream I had in Hawaii.
‘While You Were Out’ was produced by Alan Guettel. Without him they wouldn’t have made any sense.
The shows were first broadcast April 10th and April 11th, 2006.