NP: John Cage, 4'33" (extended dance mix)

Okay, I came across this article yesterday extolling the power nap, and it pretty much confirmed everything I've said for the last N years about sleep cycles. So apparently I wasn't imagining all of it. Twenty minutes is the ideal, because that covers the first two stages. Overall, your cycles are 90 to 120 minutes. Waking up in slow-wave sleep is the worst.

I hadn't really seen any literature on the "micro-" and "nano-" iNaps (sorry, marketing has gotten the best of me), but empirically, I buy into it. Lately I've been a big fan of sort of zoning into half-sleep while watching TV for a minute or two, and can come out of that pretty refreshed. But the mini-nap advice is dead-on with what I recall from things I read way back in college.

Of course, nothing in the article hints at why we need sleep, particularly why stage one plus two does what it does. To me, that's a biological mystery almost on par with how the universe began, because nobody seems to have a clue. At least the last time I looked.