That I have a device on my wrist that allows me to track my sleep is a bit magical. It’s also not as accurate as I would like, but it’s given me enough information to allow me to learn about sleep and understand my own issues that seem to track back to an incident in my early teens.

That incident lead me to only sleep when exhausted, and over the decades that has been something that I simply accepted as normal. When you know nothing else, what you have is what you have.

The watch – I have a Samsung – isn’t perfect. I don’t give it any of the hints at the prompts, and I just look at the blood oxygenation and what it says are REM cycles and deep sleep. It struck me over the past few weeks that this is something we should all know. We should all know more about how we are supposed to sleep. No one ever told me about it, and by the time I saw a psychologist I already had started tracking sleep.

I can’t say how much of my life has been affected by sleep deficiency. I expect I was also sleep deprived at times, but I would say sleep deficiency would be a better description.

People might ask me if I slept well, and of course I said yes if I slept because it was all very binary to me. In fact, the world of mankind often rewarded me for my ability to get by on little sleep, to wake up alert and ready for an emergency – and conversely, I often went with those rewards and so my life went in that direction.

One of my greatest brags in my 20s was being able to drink 4 shots of espresso before I went to sleep. I never considered the quality. I never considered the importance of sleep because no one ever really talked about it. As a child, I was always afraid of missing something when I was asleep. A book would need to be read that night, etc, etc.

Sleep was something I considered a luxury, and my life was not filled with luxury. There were things that needed to be done, and there was no one else I could depend on to do them.

Maybe it’s all relatively new to medical science, with these sleep patterns and all that we now know about sleep. Maybe it was the pace of life I lived, not burning the candle at both ends but throwing the entire candle in the broiler. People would talk about their dreams and I simply did not had any I recalled.

For me to have a dream was… rare, and some might think that because of that dream it would be important. Of course, I thought so, since when I did dream, the dreams were all linked to extreme exhaustion because I was obsessed with completing or doing something, but the fact that I did not consistently had dreams was a bit troubling.

The sleep tracker can be dangerous though, having you track statistics and trying to meet goals. For a period, I was caught up in that when I realized again that the readings on the instrument panel of my life were not as important as the quality of my life.

I gauge my sleep much better now without the device, only because it came free with my phone and I decided to explore it.

Now I don’t use the watch as much, letting it charge while I do. And I dream much more now, I feel actually refreshed after sleep and I wonder how many people out there are suffering sleep deficiency. It’s not that I’m off on a crusade about it, but if you don’t dream, if you don’t feel refreshed after sleep, do a bit of research even if you can’t see a doctor about it.

Sleep is not for the dead. It’s important, and I never realized that much since no one told me.

I’ve told you.