I've written about sleep a few times in this space: I've talked about how we chase each other around in circles, how, at times, sleep eludes me, but at other times I keep well ahead of its primal embrace (perhaps to my great detriment). But I haven't gone into too much detail about my feelings about sleep, and that's something I'd like to rectify today.
This is on my mind right now because I took a nap today. It will be a challenge for me to express to you how uncharacteristic that is for me -- I basically consider napping to be an absolute last resort. Whatever else my feelings on sleep may be, I've always preferred to commit to sleeping for a good long while once I've hit the hay. Today, the wife woke me up to go eat dinner, but if she hadn't, I'm sure my nap would have extended into a full-on sleep session. Who needs dinner?
I must have been in the deepest part of my sleep cycle when she woke me, because I felt like an absolute wreck. I could barely open my eyes, and every part of me felt fatigued and sore. It still hasn't completely worn off; I'm really looking forward to turning in after finishing this post.
I know it's illogical, but I hate sleep. I resent the toll of time it demands from me, and the price it inflicts for refusing to give in to its demands. I think about it like this: if you sleep eight hours per night, you spend a third of your life asleep. I may be 27 years old, but I've only been awake for 18 of those. It may seem crazy, but that's really upsetting to me.
I've never been entirely comfortable with sleep. From an early age, I would stay up late reading anything I could get my hands on. My mom tried to make sleep by instituting a lights-out rule, but I'd still be able to read with the dim light streaming in from the hallway (although this probably ruined my eyes).
This continued until I was in high school, when I suddenly found myself unable to sleep at all some nights. I'm not sure where the insomnia came from, since my life wasn't especially stressful, but I can remember the restlessness of some nights driving me to go for long walks in the early hours. Those walks were terrifying, though, because I was afraid of getting in trouble for being outside at that time. On top of that, at 3 A.M., everything is terrifyingly creepy. What kind of weirdos are out and about in the suburbs at that time? Besides completely normal people like myself, of course. One late-night walk in particular deserves its own post at one point, scary as it was. Just you wait.
In college, I had classes at 8:30 A.M. every day, but absolutely no desire to go to sleep before anyone else who might have a more forgiving schedule. That meant I usually got about four hours of sleep a night. I once calculated that, if I slept through the entire weekend, I could just about balance out the amount of sleep I would miss if I stopped sleeping during the week altogether. Unfortunately, I never figured out how to institute that particular sleep reconfiguration.
I'm not really interested in nontraditional sleep patterns, though. My problem isn't when I have to sleep, it's that I have to sleep, and sleeping at different times than other people won't fix that.
What's important is that, for those first three years of college, I got by swimmingly on very little sleep. I was excited, empowered, and generally enjoying life. Like Thomas Jefferson, four hours was all I needed.
By the time I graduated, though, my body had had enough. It took me aside and told me that, from then on, we'd be getting six to eight hours per night, or else. What do you say to yourself in those circumstances? I grudgingly accepted, and for a time I tried to fight the requirement with a daily dose of energy drink. But I realize how unhealthy that route is, and it never really worked, so I left that folly behind. Still, I feel like I'm living in a hostage situation. My body has a power over me that I can't contest.
All the more reason to want to leave it all behind and switch to a robot body. I won't even miss the dreams; I've always preferred the ones I've had when awake, anyway.
I have a lot more to write about sleep, but this is it for tonight. Let's see what I can get away with.
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