Do you sleep with the lights on or in darkness?

like i like my women, dark and cold.

total darkness

sometimes i'll fall asleep with the tv on, but mostly dark

It took me a long time to get used to light from the windows - backyard lights, an orange sky, etc. Here's a Google streetview of one of my old apartments. For almost two years, I slept in darkness until one week when they decided to fix that security light directly outside my window. Then my place started to look like a prison break. I moved out after trying to shoot the damn thing out with an air pistol.

Now, I'm chill. I don't mind there being light in the room as long as the source is indirect. Since I'm up and down anyway thanks to the kids and a bladder going on 40, it's an okay trade-off.

HAET THE TV SO MUCH. So fucking much. I don't care if it's totally dark or not, but no goddamn tv, because I can sense the changing levels of light THROUGH MY EYELIDS as what's on-screen changes, and it makes me BATTY and distracted and restless.

Moon, streetlights in practice, but I do better in complete darkness. Sometimes I resort to a sleeping mask if my insomnia is cranking up.

dark but with outside light, no shades. i prefer to sleep in total darkness but i can't wake up with the shades down.

Same here with the TV. And I also have a hard time with the sound since even though I'm trying to sleep, my brain is still trying to follow along with the dialogue.

Can't sleep to the radio either for the same reason, unless it's classical or white noise.

HAET THE TV SO MUCH. So fucking much. I don't care if it's totally dark or not, but no goddamn tv, because I can sense the changing levels of light THROUGH MY EYELIDS as what's on-screen changes, and it makes me BATTY and distracted and restless.

― go peddle your bullshit somewhere else sister (Laurel), Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:04 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this.

dark, but bedroom window faces out onto our front porch so I get a bit of light from the outside light. til I was bout 10 or 11 I couldn't sleep without a hall light on, I don't know when that changed.

i guess til I was about 10 or 11 lol doh

Glad I'm not alone. Sorry to FREAK OUT ON YOU ALL but I'm not exaggerating when I say that one of the best parts of my days now is that moment when I turn out the lights and lie down calmly with my covers all arranged and in the dark and silent room where I am ALONE.

pich blaq

tho i'm capable of falling asleep in most anything

Mr Veg gets raagh because I always make him turn the tv down before I go to bed, but I really hate lying in bed hearing every single word from the tv, that weird bass reverb and it burrows into my head and I hate it. It doesn't take much for me to go off to sleep, and I sleep heavily so that's probably why he gets annoyed.

but we don't have a tv in our bedroom, thankfully. I don't like that. I can see if I was sick I would like it

god who sleeps with shit on, i truly do not understand this

MY EX, IS WHO

the only exception is if Mr Veg has gone somewhere and I'm the only one in the house. I usually have to have the radio on to fall asleep, because I get weirded out by there being no 'other person' noises in the house. which is very lame and married of me idgi

xpost I had a feeling ;)

a fear of the dark is still one of my phobias. i keep the computer on (as low-level ambient light) as well as the dimmed lights in the adjacent room of my apartment.

My preference is total darkness but I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere. The rising sun often gets me up and as a result I'm almost incapable of sleeping in these days unless I go to bed REALLY late or an in some cave-like room.

Seriously I don't think I got an acceptable amount/quality of sleep for months at a time because of that and because he stayed up lots later than I did. Never being rested kept me REALLY off-balance and unstable all the time, which may be part of why he did it.

:(

Eh I'm probably giving him too much credit tbh. But anyway! Quiet! And dark! And with no one touching me or putting any pressure on the covers that touch me!

lol yay!

Have always found it easier to sleep in the afternoon for some bizarre reason. At night i always fall asleep watching something on the laptop or listening to something unless i've been out and had a few drinks. I can't seem to switch off, as soon as i lie down in the dark i get restless in a matter of minutes and my mind starts thinking about anything and everything. Around 3 in the afternoon though (when tired) I pull my hooded top up and i'm away no matter how light it is outside.

My preference is total darkness but I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere. The rising sun often gets me up and as a result I'm almost incapable of sleeping in these days unless I go to bed REALLY late or an in some cave-like room.

― ENBB, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 1:28 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

^this.

my bf sleeps in late all the time and makes sounds like he's being mauled by a bear if he's disturbed before noon, which made me weirdly angry for a while. but he never keeps me up and is very considerate about disturbing my sleep to the point of changing his clothes in the bathroom if he's up later than me. so it's all good. sometimes it seems like we're on different schedules but i respect his autonomy and he respects mine so it works.

Lights on (TV optional) until a few years ago.

I've had a very strange unsettled sleeping pattern since I can remember and it got to the point where I had to try and straighten it out before I turned into some sort of ghost.

So I did, now I sleep fine, lights out/no TV in the bedroom.

I sleep with music on lots. Dunno why but I always think more fondly of a band after having slept with them.

Total darkness, definitely.

Like Laurel, I had an ex who liked to fall asleep to the tv, to the point where she had one in the bedroom and would put it on before going to bed. I'm sorry, as a fucking adult, you owe it to yourself to learn to sleep without a panacea. I'll admit to desiring an actual bed to sleep on, and darkness, but I feel those are pretty standard.

Dark and curtains shut, though my curtains are (pretty thick but) a long way short of blackout curtains. I have a fairly dim streetlight outside which doesn't bother me, but any more light than that can keep me awake.

When the building opposite has left its outside lights on / cars go past all night / hallway light is on = slightly irritable me. Staying with someone who keeps the light or a TV on = no sleep for me, turn into serial killer within a couple of hours. Rargrghh.

Lights off and curtains open, but with a cotton sheet over the window.

I'm sorry, as a fucking adult, you owe it to yourself to learn to sleep without a panacea.
Wow, someone's angry, sounds like you need a good nights sleep?

Most of the time, I go to sleep before my wife, so her bedside lamp is on when I turn my light out. (It never bothers me -- I'm always asleep within 3-4 minutes of my light going off.) After she goes to bed, it's dark + moonlight/streetlight.

Dark dark dark, to the point of not even having a glow in the dark alarm clock anymore. Lived in two places that could not be made dark (or quiet - hello bar w/ live music every night 2 doors down in ancient building w/ no possibility of soundproofing what was I thinking) and spent those years constantly cranky, confused, and unfocused. Current place has blackout curtains and is in a much much quieter neighborhood.

Sleeping in absolute darkness freaks me out. I don't need TVs on or nightlights or stuff like that. Just a little bit of outside light coming into the room so that it doesn't feel like I'm falling into a black hole.

i tend to read with a lamp on until quite late while my gf sleeps beside me- she always insists it's no problem and seems to sleep fine regardless, but now i feel a bit of an asshole :(

anyway, noisy neighbours are really the problem in my house wrt sleep

Ah yes, I like to put something in front of the display on my alarm clock, so I can see the time if I want to but I am not lying there lit up by the numbers as I go "ah shit, it's 3:07 and I'm still awake... tick tock tick... now it's 3:08 and I'm still awake" all night

gotta admit, I'm not sure I'd like absolute darkness either, though. being able to see at least a little of where I am is reassuring. plus I don't like moving around in the dark. hooray for my bedside lamp with fader so that I can fade it up just far enough to see my way around without suddenly waking myself up with the full brightness

I was probably overly cranky about it, but I really think if you're going to ever sleep in the same room as someone else, you should figure out how to do so in a way that doesn't affect someone else's sleeping.

I mean, you could turn it around and say that I shouldn't demand that there NOT be a television on, but I don't think that's a real argument.

I think sleeping in the sleeping-room takes priority. All other activities happen at the discretion of the person who needs to sleep earlier/more.

(xpost) I have one of those sunrizer lights that slowly dims as I fall asleep and then simulates the sun coming up in the morning. It starts to come on about 30 minutes before the alarm goes off. For me, it's great to wake up in the middle of the night and see the "dawn" hasn't started - I can usually fall back to sleep w/o checking or caring about the time, I know I've got at least half an hour to snooze still.

at weekends i like to kick back at night with the tv on and just fall asleep. But my new flat has an awesome bedroom with no streetlamps out the window and no sound access to main roads. So I'm in total darkness and literally complete silence.

I have a sunrise alarm lamp too - it is pretty good because a) I can use it as the aforementioned fading bedside light and b) woken by light = less cranky than woken by beeping and also less likely to mash the off button and then fall asleep again. But I do worry it's made me more likely to wake up when natural dawn light comes through the curtains, as its only real bad point so far.

Jaq that is awesome! The closest I got was one of those SAD lamps that I'd flip on after the alarm went off, but that's pretty much.... not at all similar.

I sleep with danger.

They actually make panaceas?

eggs flour milk and sugar iirc

panacea with lemon curd and powdered sugar before bed will give you some messed-up dreams all night

i sleep in a fucking coffin

won't save you from shakey mo iirc

I keep mis-reading 'panacea' as 'pancreas'.

i've slept with curtains open since i was a kid - we lived on a hill looking in towards london and i used to lie in bed and stare out at the lights of the city, and having a bit of orange ambient light through a window (or, when i lived in a ground-floor room, a thin curtain) has stayed the most reassuring thing. Obviously i've had to sleep in pitch-black rooms since, and I can do it, but I don't much like it.

i can pretty much sleep in either light or dark w/no problem - if i'm tired enough noise levels aren't really an issue though. in practice i currently have no curtains, but my room doesn't face the street so i only get moonlight - i don't wake up with the sunrise though. can't imagine deliberately keeping a light in my room on when i go to bed, i would fret about electricity wastage and that would keep me awake. (have obv done the pass-out-drunkenly-in-clothes-on-top-of-laptop-with-lights-blazing thing though)

darkness always darkness

Darkness, though when exhausted I can fall asleep while reading with the light on but I wont stay that way. My brain somehow interprets light thru the curtains as "hey time to get up" which is useful when its SUN but not otherwise.

The concept of even having a television in a bedroom seems extremely weird to me.

the sun really helps me get up so i leave the curtains halfway open.

if i leave them shut i could sleep til noon, every day.

Have a blackout blind but sleep with Radio 4/World Service on *low* volume - I've slept with radio on since I was a teenager because back then my bedroom was ground floor level and next to the bathroom plus outside noises of raccoons and so forth, plus shared with a sister capable of sleeping through road repair involving sledgehammers. Now the radio masks central London noises as I'm a block away from a pretty busy road and two from a big intersection (I wish I were a bit higher up, it's quieter on top floors).

The advantages of spending my early childhood in a house that backed onto a railway line: I can sleep through anything. I used to live in a ground floor flat in Central London, despite the noise I never had any problems sleeping.

complete darkness makes you see weird shit, everything inside my head becomes amplified and its not very peaceful at all. its been a good year or two now since ive slept in silence also -cant seem to sleep without my stereo on really quiet

I started this poll because my wife likes having a little light on when she sleeps, so we have a string of christmas lights. We fall asleep with the TV on sometimes too, although we try to turn it off. Anyway, I mentioned this to someone recently and they mentioned a study that linked sleeping with the lights on to an increased incidence of breast cancer among women.

Since I don't want my wife to die, I've begun a silent campaign to gradually decrease the use of lights around our house at night. The interesting result so far: our six-year-old, who usually comes stumbling into our room to lie down with us at about 3 a.m., has been sleeping entirely through the night for the past few days since I've turned off his nightlight. And that is a trend that I really hope will continue.

study that linked sleeping with the lights on to an increased incidence of breast cancer among women.

Amazing. That's like that study that revealed that the time of day at which you eat affects how your body processes the food, regardless of how much you eat. If you are a mouse, anyway.

My brother can't sleep without the television on. If he's staying in your house and you don't have a television in your guest bedroom (which most people don't, really), then he'd rather just sleep on your sofa.
If you like to sleep in a very dark room, don't buy yourself a Revo Heritage internet radio. That thing DOES NOT DIM. We've got used to it now, but if you had insomnia, its Eye of Sauron display would really mess with your mind.

Used to use a dimmed touch lamp but the stupid thing can't use those newfangled lightbulbs so I bought an LED nightlight instead.

Anyway, I mentioned this to someone recently and they mentioned a study that linked sleeping with the lights on to an increased incidence of breast cancer among women.

Haha, was this the same study that found that masturbating can reduce the chances of prostate cancer?

That one at least makes sense.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002207/

Wrong tags

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002207/

Hmmm.

Are the risks of breast cancer greater north of the Arctic Circle? Where are these women working their third-shift, a bar? Do blind people have a proportionately greater chance for depression due to their seemingly constant seasonal light disorder?

Some interesting stuff in that study, but hmm.

And that didn't come out right. I don't mean to imply that the only place a woman can work the third-shift is in a bar. But I would say that the environment of any third-shift job would likely be more hazardous than that of your normal first-shift office job, for men or women.

I think a lot of the women working night shifts in that study were nurses. But yeah, I'm not convinced by the conclusion that it is artificial light causing cancer in night-shift workers - I mean, isn't lack of natural light more likely to cause problems than exposure to artificial light, although the two may be correlated?

But I am not medically trained in any way, so perhaps I should not attempt to contribute here.

It's not stopping me!

Well, there are several other studies cited in that article, but you are right - they're far from offering a conclusion. But there does seem to be an increasing trend in research on the topic. And it has sort of tipped my mind toward the idea that I really should be trying to maximize darkness while I'm sleeping, which seems healthier anyway.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBxbWkf4z-E

didn't think that sleeping with the tv on would make me such a freak. :'( (though i do do it for sound rather than light.)

I won't have a TV in the bedroom and neither will Em. Do leave the radio on sleep, set to a news channel, really low volume, when we go to bed though; pretty much acts as white noise. No lights on in the house, and our bedroom blind keeps out maybe 80-90% of the streetlights.

Giant fluffy cats are the issue with regards sleep deprivation.

I don't know how anyone can sleep with their cat or dog in the room. Critters do not, in my experience, sleep through the night without waking you up. Maybe you get used to it after a while, but on the few occasions I've ever done this, the only time it was comfortable was when I was camping and I had the dogs in my bed for warmth.

We used to sleep with two of our dogs and our cat in the bed. We're currently doing a separate sleeping arrangement, but not because it was uncomfortable! They slept through the night for the most part and really did their part to keep us warm.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Dog_Night#Band_name_origin

Jones, my cat sleeps in a ball slightly above by my head and it's generally not too much of a problem, I occasionally wake up with a back paw resting on my forehead when she stretches out during the night, but otherwise I like it. Our other cat sleeps at the bottom by my g/f's feet.

When I say "I don't know how people do it" I don't mean "you must be a FREAK", I just mean that bloody animals never sleep through the night when they sleep on or near me. Maybe I'm too exciting! It's also possible that I shift around too much in my sleep and I wake them up, which in turn wakes me up. I never wake up in anything like the same position I went to sleep in.

I had this one cat who used to try and sleep on my face. That was pretty bad, admittedly.

our dog mainly sleeps on our bed, but he jumps off and on a few times a night. he's little and light though so it's not disturbing at all. however when there's a full moon he remains by the window all night and his face becomes stern and proud and wolflike, but with a sad note that looks as if he's apologising to the moon for living in a house with cushions.

primeval 'never gonna happen' really