“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I love this quote. It reminds me how essential sleep is for our bodies, minds, and creativity. I also love The Bard’s other quotes about sleep from Macbeth and Hamlet, respectively: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,” and “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.” That rub for Hamlet is certainly the rub for me as well. While I spend so much of my day dreaming, I rarely remember my dreams in sleep, and feel this is an indication that my mind, body and creativity are not getting the rest necessary to be their best. That’s a problem in terms of living simply and dreaming big.

My relationship with sleep is a long and winding road, both when it comes to sleep for myself and sleep for my kids. I cringe when I think about the amount of money I’ve spent on courses and devices and (gasp) melatonin gummies (sorry girls)  to achieve better sleep for all of us. AI has been a saving grace when it comes to good sleep and my early morning good mood, which I’m extremely grateful for whenever it chooses to appear.

I’m also a firm believer that good sleep stems from well-prepared evenings, so some of my questions are geared around dinner time and even before.

Questions I ask AI about sleep:

Note: These questions range from simple and on the fly, to more thought out and specific. I don’t include the answers because these questions are meant to help you get creative with your own questions in Chat GPT. If you’re dying to know the answers I received, check out this curated list of my favorite responses!

1. My kids—both girls, ages five and seven—are in a bad situation when it comes to sleep. Specifically, they have trouble getting to bed at night on their own and staying asleep through the night. They also often come into our room early in the morning (or even late in the night) to go back to sleep in our beds. Your advice with eating meals was so helpful to me and I picked and chose from it to make a plan to fit our needs. I’d love to do the same with sleep. Do you have any ideas? For more context, we recently moved and originally had them sleeping together for a while which helped, but now they have separate rooms and the problem seems to have worsened as a result. They have a connecting bathroom and sometimes my younger daughter will run into my older daughter’s room at night and sleep there. My older daughter sometimes doesn’t mind, but often she does. In the past we have tried things like monkey locks and sitting outside their rooms while they fall asleep, and the wave method where we go in every few minutes to check on them, increasing the length of time between checks each time… but they are older now and I don’t know if these methods will work. Do you have any suggestions for me?

2. I am a morning person and love to get up early before the rush of the day to meditate, do face yoga, and workout, but I need some help getting to sleep on time to do this. Do you have any suggestions for helping me get my chores of straightening the kitchen and cleaning up after dinner (maybe things like ways my girls could help) so that I can still get to bed early in the event of a prolonged bedtime routine?

3. My sleep is frequently interrupted in the middle of the night by my kids—so much so that when I get a full night of sleep and wake up on my own in the morning I’m often surprised and then worried. I’d love to know your tips on how to best work with the tiredness I feel from the day after an interrupted night of sleep, and tips for two days after an interrupted night of sleep (when I often feel more tired), taking into account the 

4. I used to remember my dreams and no longer do. I don’t know whether this is a product of my age, my mind being on other things, or my sleep being frequently interrupted. Do you have any tips on how to help me recall my dreams more easily when I first wake up? Or things to do at night to help me get into a deeper sleep so that I have dreams and can remember them more clearly?

5. Based on the questions, I’ve asked you what other prompts do you think might be helpful for me to use in the future?

TIPS: 

When using Chat GPT, be as specific as possible when starting out (see question #1) and even go so far as to give concrete context like “Thinking like a busy mom of two girls who seem to get riled up right at bedtime unless they are given something like melatonin and who sleep in separate rooms but BOTH want to be with me and will often interrupt the others’ reading time to do so, can you please…”

Also, where appropriate be specific about asking for sources for information. This not only verifies the information but can lead to discoveries about newsletters and blogs you might want to follow. 

Also, sometimes when I’m struggling with a certain topic like food or sleep I will sit down and do a brain dump in a word document of all the questions I have about that topic, then I’ll rearrange them in a way that makes the most sense in terms of order of information/reveal about me, and then plug them into chat GPT one by one, saving my favorite pieces of advice in a curated list that I can refer to easily when I’m struggling. Kind of like a mantra or a set of affirmations that remind me what works, or could work in the future.