Guides
Guides from Dreamland: sleep science, recovery, buying advice and family sleep. Written to be useful, checked against real sources, designed in New Zealand.
Practical, fact checked guides to sleeping better in a New Zealand home: temperature and damp, hygiene, screens, and what a good night actually looks like.
A good night’s sleep is not a perfect score: for most adults it means roughly 7 to 9 hours most nights, few disruptions, fairly consistent timing, and waking up able to function, rather than hitting any single deep sleep or REM number.
Read →
In New Zealand the practical target for a healthy, sleep friendly bedroom is around 18 degrees Celsius, the World Health Organization minimum, yet the average Kiwi bedroom sits near 14 degrees in winter, cold enough to fragment your sleep and leave you stiff in the morning.
Read →
Sleep debt is the running gap between the sleep you need and the sleep you get, and it adds up: a few short nights leave you foggy and flat, you cannot fully repay it with one weekend lie in, and the only real fix is getting back to consistent, sufficient sleep.
Read →
Your mattress is one of the dirtiest things you own: a used bed can hold anywhere from 100,000 to several million dust mites whose waste is a leading indoor allergen, and the fix is a handful of cheap weekly habits plus replacing the mattress once it is past about 6 to 8 years.
Read →
Late night competitive gaming costs you sleep in two honest ways: it leaves you wired so you take longer to drop off, and it pushes your bedtime later, so the fix is a gaming curfew about 60 to 90 minutes before bed plus a real wind down, not giving up the game.
Read →
Jet lag is your body clock stuck on home time, and the most powerful fix is not a supplement but light: get bright light in the morning after flying east and in the evening after flying west, shift your routine before you go, and give yourself a couple of patient days at the other end.
Read →
How sleep and recovery shape athletic performance, with the honest read on the science: what the studies show, what your recovery numbers really mean, and how to use them.
For an athlete, sleep is the highest return recovery tool there is: most adults need at least seven hours and those training hard do better around eight to ten, because deep sleep drives physical repair and REM locks in skills, so protecting your hours pays off more reliably than any supplement or gadget.
Read →
A readiness or recovery score is a useful personal signal of how recovered you are, not a verdict on your day or a guaranteed predictor of performance: numbers like 85 are made by your device, not by science, so use your own trend to decide when to push and when to ease off, rather than chasing a magic threshold.
Read →
In a landmark Stanford study, basketball players who spent several weeks getting more sleep ran measurably faster and shot more accurately. They were elite young athletes, so the exact numbers are not a promise for everyone, but the direction is clear and well supported: more quality sleep helps your body recover and perform.
Read →
Your wearable is a useful awareness tool, not a medical device: trust it for trends in your resting heart rate, heart rate variability and total sleep, treat its sleep stage breakdown as a rough estimate, and never use it to diagnose yourself, see a doctor for anything that needs diagnosing.
Read →
The "sleepy athlete mocktail", tart cherry juice with a little glycine and magnesium, is a popular evening wind down drink: tart cherry has the best evidence behind it for a modest sleep and recovery benefit, the others are weaker, and for any supplement amounts you are better asking a pharmacist or dietitian than guessing.
Read →
How to choose: mattresses, beds, pillows and the rest.
You sleep more short stay guests and earn better reviews by designing each bedroom for usable capacity rather than bed count: flexible furniture that flexes when you need it, a genuinely comfortable and well supported bed, and a calm room you can photograph honestly.
Read →
A mattress warranty protects you against manufacturing faults; it is not a promise of how long the mattress will stay comfortable and hygienic, which for most people in New Zealand is about 6 to 8 years.
Read →