Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26860891-20150809053331

Have you ever wondered why we sleep? Yeah, we heal and grow the most when we sleep but that's more of a side effect of a more important process. People haven't always slept, millions of years ago people were awake 24 hours a day. This allowed them to be safe from predators in the night. However, more recently (as long as people have documented it) people and many other animals have become unconscious at various times of the day. I’ll be talking about people, as that’s my specialty.

Have you ever wondered why we grow and heal the most while we are unconscious? Have you ever wondered why people lose their interest and liveliness as they get older? Well the answer lies in what many consider to be just folklore. The first encounters with them were in the mid-17th century in Eastern Europe. They were originally referred to as The Sandman. However, it would be more accurate to refer to them as Sandmen, as they are a species of ancient beings numbering in the thousands as opposed to a singular being. They are hard to describe using words from the English language, especially as I am not fluent in it, but I guess I’ll give it my best shot. They almost look like wisps, floating through the air with a sense of grace and fluidity. However, it’s almost a dark light. They emit something that allows them to see in the blackness of a bedroom at midnight, however the Sandmen are pitch black in colour and it’s not light as any human understands it. Humans can see around the room, but it’s hard for them to understand how. They just know they can see what’s around them, despite the room being completely devoid of light. The Sandmen have no limbs or head until they approach a sleeping human. Prior to being within a close proximity of a human, the sandmen looks more like a dark blob of complete darkness wafting in the air like smoke. Upon seeing a human, 2 ghastly arms flow from the sides of them as well as a prominence that is best described as a head despite the lack of neck, nose or mouth. The only distinguishable feature on this bulge are the eyes which are, more black than pitch black. It’s hard to describe, and you cannot truly understand it without witnessing it firsthand. However, this would be futile as seeing its eyes would cause your mind to panic and immediately block the memory from your conscious mind.

The folklore states the Sandmen came every night and gave the people of the village pleasant dreams by sprinkling sand over their eyes. This however, is false. Somewhere along the timeline of humanity (and possibly other creatures, again I’m not sure. I specialize in humans) your ancestors decided to trade life energy for strength. It isn’t sand transferring from their fingers to one’s eyes, but life energy being absorbed from the person’s eyes into a Sandman. Now, this life energy isn’t what you’re probably thinking of. It most likely won’t kill you physically to lose it, and you won’t become pale and weak. This life energy is what makes you… alive in a sense. It’s why young children have imaginary friends, have vivid nightmares, and find everything down to a caterpillar on the front porch interesting. They drain it slowly, and not every single night as to not arouse suspicion, leaving us to believe it’s simply people growing up or maturing. It is believed the Sandmen use this life energy to do one of two things:

1)       Use it to sustain themselves and create offspring. The Sandmen are unisex (Often referred to as Male) so they cannot procreate in the traditional sense taught by either your school or parents. So they use this life energy to both feed themselves, and create more Sandmen. I would describe this process to you, but most of the steps require words that have no proper translation into English (or any other known language for that matter) making any attempt futile.

2)       Inject it back into some randomly selected people to induce horrific nightmares in order to regenerate life energy faster. Fear can make your imagination go wild, this is due to an abundance of life energy that builds up because of the way your body (and every other human body) responds to fear. I don’t know why, but human evolution has made increased life energy regeneration to be a reaction to fear.

However, despite doing this for countless years, the Sandmen have not perfected their craft. They have a “one size fits all” mentality, and it’s not tailored to each and every person. This can cause err... issues in certain individuals. This is what really causes sleep disorders.



Insomnia: If you suffer from insomnia, you have awoken very suddenly not allowing the Sandman time to stop and get hidden. This means you saw a Sandmans eyes and the life energy being drained from your own. Now your subconscious knows what can happen when you sleep, and refuses to do so at all costs. Your conscious has repressed the memory, but your subconscious remembers. This is why it’s near impossible to trigger. Your body is doing all it can to reject the medication so it doesn’t fall asleep. Whenever you do sleep however, a Sandman almost always comes to you and drains while it has the chance. This is what prevents the next issue from happening to 100% of people who suffer from insomnia.



Vivid dreams and recurring nightmares: If you have this issue, you once awoke very suddenly, but instead of being scared you fought back. The Sandmen are giving you your space, and not draining from you for a while. Don’t mistake this for fear, they aren’t afraid of you. They could kill you in an instant. They could tear apart your mental state, firing nerves making you have a seizure, or maybe just make you kill yourself through seeing the horrors that you can’t see in the traditional sense of sight, but horrors they can make you see in more abstract senses. There are so many ways they could destroy you without even touching you, but they deem that unnecessary. What a waste of life energy it would be. So they give you time, and eventually the dreams should subside within a few years as the Sandmen get back to their normal routine. Either that, or the Sandmen have randomly selected you to be one of the unlucky people who gets injected with extra life energy (congratulations, you won the worst lottery in existence) to cause these nightmares. Fear is a very good way to create more life energy, and most of the time the life energy regeneration is worth more than the life energy that was injected.



Schizophrenia: Same as above, but you became aggressive more than once. They don’t bother with you and the life energy has built up your imagination so much you’re almost dreaming in real life. This could subside if they decide to give you another chance, but depending on how they feel you may never recover.



Sleep Paralysis: You awoke, but very slowly. So they hid. You know that feeling people refer to as “the intruder”? The feeling like someone is in the room with you choking you? Well, that’s real. It’s out of view, most likely behind you or beside your bed choking you to prevent your screams. This shocks your mind so violently you are, well, paralysed with fear. If you have this repeatedly, see your doctor about sleep medication to stop yourself from waking up.



Now you’re probably asking, “How do you know all of this, and why are you telling me?” Well people talk in their sleep sometimes, I know you do even if you don’t know it. Consult your doctor for a way to remedy this, it may annoy others around you at some point or another. Anyways getting side tracked. After hearing people talk in their sleep and seeing words on computer screens that were left on as well as notebooks left open, I guess I’ve just picked up on some English. Enough to get this down anyway. As for the latter question. As previously mentioned, fear makes life energy regenerate very, very quickly. The more life energy you have, the more I can take, the more nightmares I can cause, the more I can take and so on. Well, I’ll see you soon. <ac_metadata title="Why people sleep (Revision 2)"> </ac_metadata>