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That’s because parts of your brain are actually asleep – There’s no control center in your brain that dictates when it’s time for you to drift off to dreamland. Instead, sleep creeps up on you as independent groups of brain cells become fatigued and switch into a sleep state even while you are still (mostly) awake. Eventually, enough of these groups switch and you doze off.

If sleep were being directed by a control center, the whole brain would respond at the same time. Instead, it behaves like a self-directing orchestra in which most sections are more-or-less in sync, but a few race ahead or lag behind at any given time.
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Smell the roses! – Nightmares? If you want sweet dreams, sleep with flowers in your bedroom?especially roses.

When volunteers slept with roses in their rooms, they reported having pleasant dreams, but the smell of rotten eggs had the opposite effect. BBC News quotes researcher Tim Jacob as saying, “Smell is the only sense that doesn’t ‘sleep.’ Information continues to reach the limbic system of the brain and that includes the hippocampus, or memory area and the amygdala, that is involved with emotional response. Other senses have to pass through the ‘gate’ of the thalamus, which is closed when we sleep.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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Can’t sleep? Lots of people have that problem. Doctors speculate that the accidental overdose death of actor Heath Ledger happened because he was taking medication for a bad case of insomnia. Live near an airport or highway? Traffic noise you’re not consciously aware of can keep you awake. Kept up by a barking dog? You may not be able to stop him but you MAY be able to understand him: researchers think they have finally deciphered the language of dog barks.
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We now realize that sleep is useful in ways we didn?t suspect, but scientists still don’t really know WHY people need to sleep. They also think that not getting ENOUGH sleep is one of the things that is making our kids fat!

Researchers now say that diets high in fat and sugar may not be the only things contributing to American children’s expanding waistlines. A new study by Julie Lumeng suggests that the kids who aren’t getting enough sleep also may be at an increased risk for being overweight. Scientists found that children who get less than 9 hours of sleep every night are at an increased risk of being overweight, regardless of their gender, race, socioeconomic status, or the quality of the home environment.
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