Sleeping

I was so surprised to hear in The Pocket Book of General Ignorance that on average a person falls asleep in about seven minutes. Like a lot of people I was sure that I take a long time to fall into a deep sleep, but wondered if perhaps all the waking (apparently around 35 times a night) was clouding my judgment. It's quite reasonable that I could fall asleep in seven minutes then wake fifteen or thirty minutes later for the first of thirty five times and assume I had never been asleep.

Clearly a time-lapse video with some cool music was in order.

There are lots of mysteries involved in sleeping; how much tossing and turning occurs, under-cover/without-cover, whether or not you stay in bed, etc. As I found out, a time-lapse video only really reveals the general goings on of sleep because the sleeping is played back so fast, no small details are revealed though the footage is interesting. It is however, a little like old family photos where the person most interested in the video is the sleeper themselves. I suppose in the case of unusual sleeping practices interest may stir in a wider collection of people. This of course doesn't make creating the video any less fulfilling, making cool stuff is always good.

As with pretty much every time-lapse video I have made so far, there was difficulties. If you want to take pictures of anything you generally need light to do it (I don't have any night vision stuff), if you don't have an intervelometer you need to use a laptop to trip the camera.So this means you have to sleep with the light on and a laptop whirring away. I sleep like a log and so this didn't bother me (video above), but Jody on the other hand, is not such a heavy sleeper. Probably even more annoying than the light or the laptop is the sound of the shutter mechanism on the camera which seems to get really loud once you turn the lights off and try to get some sleep! On top of all this the interval at which the camera takes a picture is 10 to 15 seconds, too far apart to feel like a rhythm, regular enough to be ongoingly annoying.