“Did you look up 'incubus'?" Ren asked, in her ear. She heard a smile in his voice.
"Yes. Let's see, 'a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep,' if I remember right."
"There. And you thought it wasn't possible. It's common enough they actually had to make up a word for it."
"Well, if you've been doing that, then you must have been discreet, because I sure haven't noticed."
"It's not my preferred method," he said. "I always wake them up first.”
Source: The Ghost Downstairs
“There is another connection between infancy and dreams: both are followed by amnesia. When we emerge from either state, we have great difficulty remembering what we have experienced. In both cases, I would suggest, the left hemisphere of the neocortex, which is responsible for analytic
recollection, has been functioning ineffectively.”
Source: The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
“Maybe, I thought, Knight would talk about the marrow.
He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to revel the meaning of life.
"Get enough sleep," he said.
He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying any more. This was what he had learned. I accepted it as truth.”
Source: The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
“Waking up in the same place in which you dozed off has never happened either to you or to anyone else. Ever. Earth does not stop moving when you sleep. Every hour that passes, Earth travels a little more than 800,000 kilometres around the centre of our galaxy. And so do you. That's the equivalent of about twenty trips around the planet. Every hour. No one minds, though, as long as their bed stays still beneath their body.”
Source: The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond
“You're kidding, right?" Shane asked. "You don't need caffeine. You need sleep." He held out the last cup, and Claire realized she'd been wrong; there was someone else in the shadows. Deeper in the shadows even than Oliver had been.
Myrnin.
He looked completely different to her now, and not just because he wasn't crazy anymore. He'd remembered how to dress himself, for one thing; gone were the costume coats and Mardi Gras beads and flip-flops. He had on a gray knit shirt, black pants, and a jacket that looked a bit out of period, but not as much as before.
All clean. He even had shoes on.
"Yes, you must sleep," he agreed, as he accepted the cup and tried the coffee. "I've gone to far too much trouble to train up another apprentice at this late date. We have work to do, Claire. Good, hard work. Some of it may even earn you accolades, once you leave Morganville."
She smiled slowly. "You'll never let me leave."
Myrnin's dark eyes fixed on hers. "Maybe I will," he said. "But you must give me at least a few more years, my friend. I have a great deal to learn from you, and I am a very slow learner.”
Source: Carpe Corpus
“There are two gradations of cold that are always acceptable: Mild Frost, which is preferable for reading and writing and any other activity done indoors, and Absolute Zero, which is the only temperature suitable for sleep. There is nothing more delicious than being swathed in a cocoon of blankets and awaking with a nose frosted over with rime, and once I do achieve vampiric heights and fall asleep with the mastery of a corpse lately dead, I am best left alone until I wake up at my usual time. I do tend to bite when rattled out of my flocculent coffin, and everyone in my building knows never to disturb me during the early morning hours. Authors, being crepuscular creatures, should never be roused before 11am: the creative mind is never turned off; it only dies momentarily and its revived by the scent of coffee at the proper time.
Bacon is also an acceptable restorative.”
Source: I Hate Summer: My tribulations with seasonal depression, anxiety, plumbers, spiders, neighbours, and the world.
“There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.”
Source: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
“But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.”
Source: The Dream of Perpetual Motion
“The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely
adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.”
Source: The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
“What functions do dreams serve today? One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us. But dreams occupy such a relatively small part of normal sleep that this explanation does not seem very compelling. Moreover, as we have seen, the evidence points just the other way: today it is the mammalian predators, not the mammalian prey, who characteristically have dream-filled sleep.”
Source: The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence