8 Phrases About Sleep

Good night is something we say as a farewell, usually at night. It can be used during the day if you will not see them before they sleep and there was some discussion of their night. A similar expression is, “Have a good night” and “Have a good sleep.” They function the same was as good night. However, I like to use, “Have a lovely night.”

Be careful about using good evening though because it is used as a greeting at night and not as a farewell. That being said, there are a few other things that you can say to someone at night.

Sweet dreams is also used as a farewell. If you use this phrase, you are telling the person that you hope they have sweet (nice) dreams while they sleep. This phrase should be used only with close relationships. It is normally only said to family members and romantic partners but it can be used for close friendships or as a joke. Sleep well is also similar to good night.

Sleep tight is an older phrase that means I hope you sleep well. A long time ago, mattresses were held together by ropes. If the ropes were too loose, the mattress would be uncomfortable. So, sleep tight means that you hope they have a comfortable bed to sleep in. Nowadays, it gives the feeling of being tucked in. That means your blankets are pressed firmly against you and possibly under you. Mothers will tuck their children into bed. It is almost a comforting thing. Finally, there is a longer phrase that says, “Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.” I think the rhyme makes it memorable. Bed bugs are small blood sucking insects that hide in mattresses. They are notoriously hard to get rid of and can cause itchy red patches on your skin.

Hit the sack or hit the hay are ways to say that you are going to bed. For example; “Hey honey, I am going to hit the hay now.” The sack might refer to a large bag that could be used as a blanket or a sleeping bag that acts like a bed when you are camping.

I need to get some shut-eye tells the listener that you are ready to close your eyes and go to sleep. Similarly, you could tell them that you need catch some Zs. We usually draw someone sleeping with Zs above them. It is a placeholder for the sound of someone sleeping well. Lights out is another way to say shut eye. The lights are out (turned off) because your eyes are closed. Winking is when you quickly close your eyes, usually one eye. There is a sleeping phrase called 40 winks and it refers to a nap or a quick rest. I am not sure of why we call it 40 winks except that it seems like a short period of time. I have also seen 20 winks and 9 winks as phrases in my research.

Another way to say that you are gong to bed is to say that you are turning in for the night. This phrase is routinely shortened to turning in. This phrase comes from sailors who had to sleep in very small areas of the ship. In order to fit in the bed, they would have to turn to get into the bed.

Similarly, I’m ready to retire for the night announces that you are ready to go to sleep. In this sense, “retire” means that you are leaving a particular place. Basically, you are announcing that you are going to leave to go to bed. Alternatively, you could announce, “I’m ready to drop.” This means that you can barely keep your eyes open and that you will soon fall over if you don’t go to bed. These are all ways to call it a night which is another way to announce that you are retiring for the night. Interestingly, calling it a day is also an idiom. It means that you are satisfied with the amount of work that has been done and you are finishing that activity for the day.

I’m going to stretch out for a minute and I’m going to lay down for a minute are also ways to say that you are going to bed. However, these phrases sound more like you are taking a quick rest or a nap. Another phrase regarding taking a nap is to kick back. Kicking back means relaxing. Think about putting your feet up on a desk or at the end of your sofa. I get the image of someone sleeping in a hammock when I hear, “I’m going to kick back.”

The last phrase for going to sleep we will discuss is cash in my chips. When you are ready to leave a casino, you cash in (or cash out) your chips, meaning you receive real money for your casino chips. The idea with this phrase is that you are ready to finish for the night. You can’t do any more gambling (life).

There are also different types of rest from naps to deep sleep. Here we are going to look at some phrases related to sleeping styles. First, we must recognize that some people are heavy sleepers and some are light sleepers. It is difficult to wake up a heavy sleeper. In contrast, a light sleeper will wake up easily if there is a disturbance around them.

Someone who is in a deep sleep is difficult to wake up. They might be a heavy sleeper or out like a light. Just as we discussed earlier, lights out refers to having your eyes closed. Out like a light is used to describe someone who is in a deep sleep.

REM stands for rapid eye movement and is the lightest form of sleep. You do most of your dreaming during REM sleep. Your deep sleep happens during non-REM sleep.

Have you ever heard someone talk about a beauty rest or beauty sleep? It means a restful sleep. I guess the idea is that if you are fully rested, you won’t have those dark bags under your eyes. Do you think rested people are more beautiful? I am not sure about that, but I guess it helps. A lot of people use beauty rest as a joke to suggest that they need more sleep to be attractive.

A cat nap is a short, light sleep. Basically it is a nap. Cats are pretty lazy and sleep a lot during the day. I am sure that is where this phrase comes from. There are other animal related sleeping idioms. A night owl is someone who stays up late regularly. They may also claim to be more productive at night. An early bird is someone who like to wake up early. I don’t understand why someone would want to do this because I am a night owl. But, an early bird has the superhuman ability to be fully awake and happy in the morning. I’ll never understand it. They say that the early bird gets (catches) the worm. This proverb means that you have to act quickly to get the benefits of something or increases the chance of success. A person who wakes up early can get things done before the owls wake up.

Speaking of naps, I have talked about siestas before. They are short naps in the afternoon and were made famous in Spain. They have led to the idea of power naps, which are short naps during work hours to be more productive. Power naps seem to work for a lot of people. The danger is sleeping too much and becoming sluggish and groggy. When you wake up from a long nap, you might be too tired to be productive. A snooze is also a short, light sleep like a nap. Do you use the snooze function on your alarm clock? It allows you to take a short nap after you wake up. I don’t recommend using it too much though.

A sleepover is when you go to another person’s house for the night. We usually use this word to talk about kids spending the night at a friend’s house. From my experience, there is not a lot of sleep at a sleep over. Kids usually stay up late playing and burn the candle at both ends. I should cover this phrase in a regular post soon. It means that you stay up late and wake up early. This phrase is often applied to people who are overworked. If you have to stay up all night working on a project and have to be at work early the next morning, you probably have to burn the candle at both ends.

So far we have talked about going to bed and styles of sleep, but there are also phrases related to the act of falling asleep. The phrase falling asleep is a frozen metaphor, meaning that we don’t even see it as a metaphor anymore. When you go unconscious, you faint or fall over. I think this is where falling asleep comes from. Nodding off is similar to this because your head is falling forward. You are so tired that you can’t support your head anymore, so it keeps falling. He’s nodding off means that he is in the act of falling asleep. Your eyelids may also “fall.” It is difficult to keep your eyes open and they feel heavy. So, heavy eyes means that you are having a hard time staying awake and will soon fall asleep.

To me crashing feels a lot like falling. I guess falling is like crashing to the floor. We use crashing to describe falling asleep when you are really tired and can barely stand anymore. It can also be used colloquially in a sentence like, “Can I crash at your place.” It means, can I sleep at your place? It is a friendly way to ask to stay over at someone’s house for the night. When my friends visit me from another city, they sometimes crash at my place.

Crashing is often applied to partying. After you party hard, dance too much, drink too much alcohol, or do too many drugs, you will crash. Hopefully, you have a safe plan or you may end up passing out in the bushes. Passing out and blacking out are when you lose consciousness. Basically, your body made you go to sleep without your permission. Blacking out is also used to talk about a loss of memory, usually from drugs or alcohol. “I blacked out and can’t remember anything from last night.”

A more peaceful way to go to sleep is by drifting off to sleep. It has the feeling of a boat slowly floating away just as your mind and your thoughts slowly drift away. Drifting off to sleep may occur during class when you are daydreaming. Daydreaming does not happen while you are asleep. Instead, daydreaming is using your imagination. It is like a conscious dream.  Rock to sleep also seems like a peaceful way to fall asleep. A mother will rock her baby back and forth in the crib to help them fall asleep. I am not sure why, but repetitive motion seems to help us fall asleep. A final way to peacefully fall asleep is to be lulled to sleep. Here, lull means a quiet time without activity. You may be lulled to sleep by a clam voice, soothing sounds, or a gentle motion.

As you can see, there are a lot of phrases related to sleep, but we haven’t even covered sleeping. Here we will look at some phrases related to actually sleeping.

You could say that a heavy sleeper is sleeping like a baby, sleeping like a log, or sleeping like a rock. I am not sure why we say sleeping like a baby. Most parents tell me that their babies keep them up at night. Joking aside, babies look very peaceful when they are sleeping. If someone is sleeping deeply, they may look like they are dead to the world. So, you may hear references to non-living things. You might be sleeping like a log (piece of wood) or sleeping like a rock.

Speaking of wood, sawing wood means snoring. It’s that loud breathing noise that some people make while sleeping. Try to imagine a loud snorer. Does it sound like sawing wood to you? If it is really bad, you could even say that they are sawing logs with a chainsaw.

If someone is sawing wood, they are probably out for the count. This is a phrase borrowed from boxing. If a boxer falls to the ground, they have some time (usually 8 seconds) to get up. The referee will count for them. If they can’t stand up after the referee counts to eight, they are out for the count. So, this is a reference to being knocked unconscious. In terms of sleep, it means the person is fast asleep. Fast asleep means to sleep deeply. It might be strange to think of someone sleeping quickly, but this form of fast is an older one. This type of fast comes from the Old German, fest, meaning to be stuck firmly. If something is fest, it is not easy to move. So, someone who is fast asleep is not easily moved out of sleep.

Perhaps someone that is fast asleep is counting sheep. There is a belief that if you count imaginary sheep in your head, it will help you fall asleep. Maybe it has something to do with focusing on a specific thing. When you are put under anesthesia, they usually ask you to count backwards, so there might be something to this. Even though counting sheep helps you fall asleep, we say that someone who is counting sheep is already asleep.

Do you know any sleepwalkers? I recently saw a video of a man who stares at his friends while he sleeps. Sleepwalking is when someone walks around or performs other actions while unconscious. Apparently, sleep walking is more common in children and most people grow out of it during their teenage years.

There is a belief that if you wake up a sleepwalker, they will attack you or have a heart attack. Other people say that they can harm themselves if they continue sleepwalking. Most experts suggest guiding the person back to their bed. Night terrors are a little scarier than sleepwalking and you should never wake up someone having a night terror. It is more than a nightmare. During a sleep terror, the person might scream while they are asleep. The are marked by extreme fear, so if you wake someone up, they might attack you. About 40% of children have night terrors. They usually last less than a few minutes and the child won’t remember it in the morning.

I think we would all prefer to be sleeping soundly. Sound sleeping is when you are sleeping deeply. Here sound does not refer to the auditory sound, but to another definition. Sound can also mean to do something competently or reliably. So, sleeping soundly means that you are good at sleeping.

But what if you are having a hard time falling asleep? Are there phrases for that too? Of course, there are. Here are a few.

Not being able to sleep is called insomnia. I have sleep-onset insomnia which means that it is difficult to fall asleep. A lot of people with this condition say it is like you can’t turn off your brain. There are other types of insomnia that affect your sleep. Sleep apnea is similar to insomnia because you basically wake up during the night. Sleep apnea is when you stop breathing during your sleep. It ruins your regular sleep cycle and causes you to feel exhausted even after you had a lot of sleep. It can be a potentially dangerous condition.

Sometimes when you have insomnia, you will be tossing and turning all night. This means that you keep moving your body when you can’t fall asleep. You are tossing the blankets and turning from side to side trying to get in a comfortable position to sleep. One of the difficult things that help with my insomnia is forcing myself to stay in one position. Tossing and turning makes it more difficult to fall asleep.

If you pull an all-nighter, it means that you didn’t sleep during the night. Another way to say this is that you didn’t sleep a wink. If you don’t get much sleep you may feel run down. That means you feel extremely tired.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not an early bird so waking up is hard to do. My coworkers will tell you that I am different person in the morning. I like sleeping in. That means I like sleeping late. The British call this lying in. I really wish I didn’t have to go to work. I would love to oversleep and have breakfast in bed. Oversleeping means to sleep more than required. I call oversleep, “My Saturday routine.”

One phrase that I hated hearing growing up was, “Rise and shine!” It is an allusion to the sun rising in the morning and shining. Like the sun, you need to get up as well. The feeling is bright, happy, and energetic. These are things I don’t feel when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed. It comes from a Roman tradition that the left side is unlucky, evil, or negative. If you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you are going to have a bad day. People with this affliction are usually grumpy or upset in the morning.

I don’t understand how people can be up at the crack of dawn. I am still asleep. At the crack of is a way of saying from the very beginning and as soon as possible. It is as fast as the crack (sound) of a whip. Dawn is when the sun rises. So, at the crack of dawn is very early in the morning: way before I am wide awake. Wide awake is being fully awake. Your eyes are wide open. If you say, “Rise and shine” at the crack of dawn, it will cause me to wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Instead, let me sleep in until I am fully awake and then bring me breakfast in bed.

There are a number of other idioms related to sleep as well. I think I could make a full post about each to these. However, this article is already very long, so I think I will just define them here.

Bunk beds – one bed on top of another
Bunk up with – sex with
Burning the midnight oil – working all night.
Dirt nap – dead
Dream on – It is unlikely to happen (used in response to a ambitious plan)
Dream world – in a perfect situation
Eat, breathe, and sleep (something) – You do it a lot. It has become your life.
Falling asleep at the wheel – failing to do your duty
I could do it in my sleep – it is easy.
Let sleeping dogs lie – Don’t make a situation worse if you can avoid dealing with it.
Pipe Dream – something that will never happen
Put it to bed – don’t think about it anymore
Put it to sleep – forget about it. Don’t make it an issue anymore
Put (it) to sleep – euthanize
Sleep with one eye open – Be careful. Don’t trust the other person.
Sleep on it – think about it more
Sleep it off – You will feel better after a good night’s rest (often applied to drunkenness).
Sleeping on the job – failing to do your duty
Sleep with – sex with
Sleeping around – many sexual partners
Sleep with the fishes – death (used as a threat)
The city that never sleeps – New York

If you can’t remember all of these phrases, don’t lose sleep over it. That means you shouldn’t think about it too much. Have a good night. I’ll talk to you soon.