Idea: hibernation

I had an interesting story idea today.

It came to me in the last few hours of work at the writing lab.  I was dead tired, and started thinking about how awesome it would be if I could carry over sleep from one night to the next.  You know: sleep 12 or 16 hours on the weekend in order to be awake for two or three straight days without getting tired.

I started talking about it with my coworkers, and from there we took it even further.  What if you could hibernated for two or three months and spend the rest of the year completely awake?  That would be pretty sweet.

So then, I started thinking: what if there were an alien species that actually operated this way?  Their life cycle would probably evolve around the seasonal weather cycles of their home planet, so they would hibernate in the “winter” and spend the rest of the time awake.

Before they developed enough technology to be able to control their environment, the entire society would have followed this cycle.  Everyone would hibernate roughly simultaneously, and spend the rest of the time awake.  With new technological developments, however, the cycle would be broken up, with aliens coming and going out of hibernation as they chose.

How would this affect society?  How would they have to structure their economy, their community, and their other social functions?  How would this affect their relationships with each other, if for three months out of a year these aliens would just sleep?  How would this complicate their military?  How would it affect their colonization of other worlds?

This is not a very well developed idea at this point, but it’s a good launching point.  Besides, it’s just kind of cool.  If I could have a superpower, it would be the ability to go indefinitely without sleep and not suffer any physiological consequences.