So recently I read a couple of different posts, one that questioned exactly what sleep is, and the other discussing aliens (who don’t sleep or have any idea what it is) reacting to humans falling asleep, mostly at random times, and it got me thinking.
What if sleep for humans was the alien equivalent of death?
Not only that, but what if our capabilities to survive in blazing heat and insane cold, among other insane abilities like our endurance and stamina, were not unheard of, but simply possessed by gods?
For example! Our ability to endure drastic temperature changes, which would kill or seriously harm any other alien, is legendary. Even other animals on our own planet can’t adapt to new temperatures at all, or at least as quickly as we do. And to aliens, that’s a skill that’s possessed by gods and heroes of old, so the day that alien researcher happened to look out the window and see one of the humans twirling around and giggling while condensed precipitation particles fell all around them, the alien’s things dropped to the floor and the alien, terrified for the human, waved frantically at them, trying to get the human in — did it know what it was doing? — but the human just laughed and picked up some of the particles to make into a round thing they called a ball. Afterwards, the aliens began wondering what other godlike skills humans possessed.
The answer was a lot.
The ability to bond with almost anything. Their perseverance. Their willpower. Speed. Intelligence.
But the most confusing of all was their nightly ritual, a ritual that even spilled into their “waking hours”, a term one of the humans used in reference to this thing called sleep.
The first time a human tried to explain this new phenomenon that occurred, calling it “sleep”, the aliens in the room freaked out. One even shrieked something in it’s native language, Gora’Gax (it was later translated to “No! Don’t sleep!”). The humans were startled by the sudden panic. “What’s wrong?” One of them asked, the one who had started to explain only to be interrupted by the panic.
How did they not know?
One of the aliens rushed forward. “Sleep is not good, John! Sleep takes you away! You do not come back from sleep!”
The human stared for a minute, before realization dawned on him. And then he started to laugh. The other humans started to chortle too, quieting down the aliens who were mystified by this casual attitude towards something so horrible.
“No, no, Qor’Ax,” the human John chuckled. “You mean death. Sleep is not death. It’s something we do, just for a couple of hours, to recharge our energy. It helps us.”
None of the aliens understood. For sleep, in most alien languages, was the word for death. Once Quatil, the researcher who had witnessed the human playing outside in the cold, had explained to Human-John what “seralapath”, which translated to “sleep” in most human languages, meant, Human-John simply laughed it off, understanding. He then proceeded to explain that for them, sleep was not death but a nice way to regain energy.
The aliens understood the literal translation as “a time in which one spends unconscious, their mind creating distractions from the knowledge of not being completely conscious during this time”. It was later discovered some humans were aware that they were sleeping when they were “dreaming”.
From there on out, aliens mostly just regarded humans as a weird form of immortal who had for some reason chosen to come hang out with them and help them. Whatever “humans” really were, the aliens on the good side were just happy that these humans hadn’t decided to be their enemies.
Space Australians
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