Happy sleepingness value time

I read somewhere — and I’m pretty sure it was in a Doctor Who novel, so I’m not taking it entirely at face value until I’ve seen confirmation — that the human body is keyed to a 25-hour day, which means that the hour at which you’re supposed to go to sleep creeps around the clock. So if you go to bed at, say, 10:00 p.m. one night, then soon afterwards you’re supposed to go to bed at 11:00 p.m., and then midnight, and so on and on until you’ve cycled around to 10:00 p.m. once again.

Obviously, if true, it’s all a lot more complicated than that. Horologically speaking, yes, that means you should be going to sleep at 8:00 in the morning at some point and waking up as the sun sets; but I’ve also read that the body also reacts to sunlight and is at its lowest ebb at around 4:00, both a.m. and p.m., which means that your body will be geared to be awake at the same time it’s geared to be asleep. I don’t believe that the length of a day on Earth could have shortened so quickly that mankind was unable to evolve to compensate for it, so there’s summat goin’ on there wot I don’t understand.

(Oh, and by the way, when I tried to look up the word “horologically” on Dictionary.com (because my hard-copy dictionary is currently preventing my four-legged, three-wheeled chair from falling over), just to make sure that I was using the word properly, it couldn’t find that derivation, but did direct me to “horological” — for which the given definition is “Of or relating to horology or a horologe.” This is not entirely helpful. If you’re going to create a hypertext dictionary, include hyperlinks.)

Anyway, the point is, for the past week or so I’ve been unable to get to sleep until around 5:00 a.m. I’m trying to fight this by setting my alarm clock for 10:30 a.m., but my alarm clock has a snooze button and my body is quite firm on the Five hours’ sleep? No thank you, sir matter, so I’m still not getting out of bed until noon or later. However, constant hitting of the snooze button means that I’m being drawn back to the surface of the world at intervals of nine minutes, and my body has been responding to those 40-winks-at-a-time sleeps by entering REM sleep — ie., dreaming.

Which, again without doing any actual research, I believe is the healthy kind of sleep, and therefore good for me.

I’m not sure what to make of this. But this morning I dreamed that Russian fighter planes were bombing Walt Disney World after getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle. My POV kept switching; I was in the park on holiday, I was supervising post-production of the movie in which this was happening, I was in the cockpit of one of the Spitfires sent out to defend the park. One of the defenders accidentally launched a missile, with a technical name that I can’t recall, towards the park itself, and another of the defenders heroically sacrificed himself by flying his plane into the missile before it could cause a more serious civilian friendly-fire incident. I was moved to tears, I can tell you, and not just because I may or may not have been in one or both of the planes myself. I believe Hans Zimmer wrote the incidental music.