We all remember the famous pill scene from “The
Matrix”: Neo is ushered into a room, where he finds Morpheus sitting on a
well-worn couch. He is offered a choice between two pills – the blue one, which
will send him back to comfortable, familiar sleep, and the red one, that will
shake him awake and open his eyes to the world which was previously unseen and
unknown to him.

The plot fits perfectly within the dystopian structure
of the movie, but in reality, such pill-popping-based sleep remedies have been
offered to anxiety-ridden modern customers for decades and have already
transformed the nature of sleep as we used to know it.

Do you want to stay awake for the night before your
exam in order to cram some last-minute knowledge in? Take this caffeine-laden
magical medicine and you are good to go. Are you suddenly beset with insomnia
due to crushing amounts of stress at work? There is a myriad of sleeping pills
for you to choose from!

The shift in sleep science

Lately, however, the most prominent sleep scientists
have been moving away from the medicinal approach and into even newer,
uncharted territories that are yet again promising to reshape our sleeping
experience.

How can we improve our hectic sleeping schedules over
the next decade or two without applying the methods of Morpheus (who is,
incidentally, himself named after a famous drug)?

Brandon
R. Peters, MD, who specializes in sleep research, believes that cognitive
behavioral therapy might hold the long-term answer for today’s tortured
insomniacs.

Education and self-help are, he claims, the keys to
the future of calm, undisturbed sleep. This particular branch of treatment,
called CBTI (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia), relies on teaching its
patients about the importance of sleep and various natural ways to induce it,
such as light exposure and reduction of anxiety.

While the aforementioned approach strays away from
technological innovations and instead depends on the wisdom of human
psychology, there are also futurist thinkers out there, claiming that
technology, if it is used for the right purposes, is still the way forward.

It’s a similar approach to sleep that most brains in
the field stay with to date – like the experts on sleep-related products over at TheSleeStudies.com, who don’t
see us in sleeping capsules or helmets anytime soon.

A peek into the future

A prominent physicist Ian Peterson, for
example, believes that our sleeping experience will become increasingly personalized
in the near future due to inventions like specialized clothing, sensory
mattresses and adjustable lighting – it is not hard to notice that the process
is already underway.

Credit: https://www.sensesensory.co.uk/

Thinkers like Jack Uldrich and Thomas Frey go even
further and predict that by 2030, the advent of artificial intelligence will
have enriched our understanding of sleep to the degree which will allow us to
take our rest to its next plane of existence and utilize it for therapeutic or
educational purposes – so you might be able to go to bed and wake up having
learnt a new language!

Taking a step back

Let us go back to the “The Matrix” now: two pills have
been offered to Neo.

If he believes that insomnia is an affliction, he will
take the blue pill and immerse himself in peaceful rest – that is what Brandon
R. Peters and Thomas Frey are doing, convinced as they are that sleep is an
integral part of every sustainable, properly-functioning human existence. But
there is the red pill as well and there is no shortage of its proponents.

.

Zoltan Istvan, a zealous transhumanist, firmly
believes that sleep itself is a problem which is supposed to be solved. With
the help of the newest technology, we can speed up the process of evolution –
and when the stakes are that high, there is no time for sleeping. For thinkers
like Istvan, the time spent sleeping is the time that we have lost, so an
advanced, personalized approach to sleep should work towards increasing the
quality, but decreasing, or even completely eliminating, the length of our
daily rest.

How close are we to not sleeping at all?

It is worth noting that these radical “red-pill” ideas
have managed to go beyond the field of theory and the ways to actually enforce
them are already in place. Countless government agencies are working tirelessly
in an effort to provide modern soldiers and fighter pilots with trustworthy
strategies of overcoming their need for sleep. And the elusive red pill itself?

It’s called modafinil. Originally used for treating
serious sleep disorders, such as narcolepsy and excessive daytime sleepiness,
it has now been approved by the United States Air Force as an effective tool
for fatigue management.

.

Consider all of these facts and you will be forced to
admit that it is not too big of a jump to predict that the usage of modafinil
will continue to grow along with the careful research performed on the drug.

Various studies have reported that modafinil is hardly
addictive, so it might very well become the next go-to over-the-counter pill
for the modern professionals and passionate transhumanist who are obsessed with
the idea of productivity.

So how will we sleep in 2030?

We can’t be certain that we’ll sleep at all. The only
substantial conclusion which can be drawn from the ever-changing technological
landscape of our day and age is the fact that, regardless of what form the
pills of the future will take – be it cognitive behavioral therapy, personalized
sleep gadgets or medicine that will banish sleep from our lives completely.

The technological possibilities will grow, the choices
that we have to make will become much more complex and the world that we will
wake up in thirteen years from now will be very different from the world as we
know it today.

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The Future of Sleep: How We’ll Sleep in 2030