Your body keeps score. Not just the emotional ledger your therapist talks about, but the biological one, the one written in neurons and hormones and the quiet architecture of your sleeping brain. When you lose sleep, especially the dreaming kind, your brain writes down every missing minute. It keeps a running tab. REM rebound is…
You lie down. You close your eyes. The clock on the nightstand ticks. Hours pass, or something that feels like hours, and in the morning you tell your partner, your doctor, the ceiling, that you did not sleep. Not a minute. Not a fragment. You were awake the entire night and you have the exhaustion…
Sleep moves through you like weather. It rolls in, settles deep, and reorganizes everything you experienced during the day, filing some things away and letting others dissolve. Most people know they sleep. Far fewer know what sleep actually does while it’s happening. REM sleep, the stage where your brain lights up like a city at…