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The Art of Extreme Napping
When it comes to sleeping in odd places nobody can beat the Chinese, or so says Bernd Hagemann. Bernd moved to the Far East in 2002 and has spent his time taking photographs of Chinese people sleeping in any position and situation. He divides his subjects into three categories: hardsleepers, softsleepers and groupsleepers, and he has more than 600 photographs at his website. Hagemann says,"Whenever I linger through the boomtown Shanghai, I carry my snap shot camera with me. Because at every corner you can discover people that either are napping in the strangest positions and situations, or are even snoring, while sunk in a deep sleep. Noteworthy are the missing mattresses and pillows!" Lets hope Bernd keeps it on the street and doesn't start breaking into houses at night to feed his sleep picture fetish.
Nice site! I found when I first moved to the developing world that people would drop off without provocation. I figured out that most people in really poor countries lack adequate privacy and comfort at home and are often sleep deprived. If they can put their heads down anywhere during the day, they will. And who'd blame them?
I ran a small computer lab in Sierra Leone that had three shifts of data entry of electoral data. I'd frequently hear beeping as some of the operators fell asleep on their keyboards!
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I'm envious to my friend. He can fall asleep under 60 secs anywhere, anytime. I cannot get a quick nap even when I'm extremely tired. It always takes me atleast 10 minutes to fall asleep.
I noticed this phenomena, when he was a regular guest to my place. Often I was sitting at my computer, coding something and he would be sitting on my couch, reading stuff. Many times I would realize I was talking to the walls when I started a sentence. Sometimes we would go shopping, and he'd manage to take a nap on a bench while I was inside a store for 5 minutes.
He told me he had teached this himself this cool talent while in the army. On camps and combat training they will deprive you of sleep to see how you can handle it. During these exercises my friend got fed up of being tired all the time, so he started to try and sleep every time they stopped. He would sleep every minute he could and thus was probably the best functioning individual of his unit.
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He's really crazy man :)
I got a friend who was a "marine" in the Belgian Army and since they often had to keep moving in "hot zones", Sleeping was not really possible. To Counter that, they learned to take minute naps anywhere, anytime, any position.. afterwards, it gave us a bunch of cool pictures at parties ;-)
I for one welcome our sleeping overlords.