QldBrainInst

That is actually an excellent question and I do believe serious research is being done on that. It would be great if we could accomplish some sleep functions while we are awake. Maybe that is what happens during meditation, and many people say that meditation is important for their well-being, making them feel refreshed. It could thus be accomplishing deep sleep functions. On the other hand, daydreaming could be accomplishing some REM sleep functions, which might involve emotional learning. Not sure about the neural correlates though, both are essentially wake-like states. One could look if certain brain structures, such as the pons, are behaving in a similar way.

One aspect of your question is actually of great interest to me: are sleep and wake really all that different, in terms of brain functions and processes? We think they are very different because when we wake up we have a conscious experience of changing states. But maybe the brain was doing something very similar all along: blocking out the world, just a little bit more during sleep. Maybe we have been blinded by our fixation on our own consciousness, which is not the end-all of what a brain does.

Paying attention kills sleep. It's like the analogy of a butterfly landing on your arm. If you pay attention to it, it flies away. If you can just be aware of it without paying attention, it lands and you fall asleep.

Not worry about it. You will get the sleep you need. Most of insomnia is sleep anxiety, worrying that you are not getting enough sleep. Sleep is a homestatically regulated, it adjusts itself in most of the time because it is such a powerful drive.

This is a big mystery. Even worse, ungulates (cows and antelopes and such) only sleep for a couple (3-4?) hours. At the other end, some bats sleep about 18 hours. Flies sleep about 8-10. Clearly this has nothing to do with intelligence or brain size. It all relates to the multiple functions of sleep, and how these can be accommodated into an animal's specific niche. We can talk about those hypothesized functions.

We don't remember most of our dreams! For example, the ones at the beginning of the night after your first deep sleep cycle, that you just slept through. I bet those were pretty interesting, but they are lost forever. One important thing to keep in mind about dreaming is that it probably has less to do with the narrative content you remember than the neural activity that is happening at the time, which is probably maintaining some crucial function in the brain, like emotional balance.