writing prompt: sleep

Sleep. A delightful pastime. One that in our hectic modern life is underestimated and sometimes even vilified. How can you sleep for so long? Don’t you realize how much you’re missing? Besides, there’s work to be done!

From my earliest days, I was a sleeper. Once I started school, just as it became apparent that I was sorely nearsighted, it was discovered I wasn’t a morning person. My body simply cannot adapt to being awake early in the day. My mother, the typical morning person, would hop out of bed and head straight for the kitchen. I, on the other hand, cannot stomach the concept of food right out of bed. She was so worried that I never wanted to eat before leaving for school that she began smuggling a beaten egg into my morning glass of chocolate milk, the only thing I would agree to. To this day, I have breakfast once I get to work, at which point I have been up for at least two hours. On the weekends, I do have breakfast sometimes, usually around two in the afternoon.

For the most part, my mind doesn’t fully wake before high noon. I wonder whether the correlation between the time at which my classes were given and my grades would be apparent. At the very least, morning classes were the stuff of daydreaming and rereading the same line in my textbook three times. The same holds true today: morning meetings result in an increase in doodling and coffee drinking. As a translator and writer, mornings are best spent taken on new projects and producing really rough drafts to be molded into some legible shape later on in the day.

For those who would have me be bright and perky at seven AM simply by going to bed earlier, I say I have tried. Not only is it incredibly difficult to turn off my mind in the early evening, but even if I do manage to fall asleep, I will simply sleep right through to late morning anyway – 10 AM, at the very earliest. I’ve gotten to know my sleep pattern well: it’s nine hours, in 90-minute cycles. Yep, I’m above-average that way. Is it laziness? Nope – it’s simply listening to my body. On weeknights, when nine hours is simply impossible, I aim for one of those 90-minute intervals. Seven and a half hours, or even six hours, is better than eight, when the alarm sounds while I’m on a downward slope into deep sleep. That’s the most horrible way to wake up.

As well, as a migraine sufferer who only finds relief through sleep, I am keenly aware of its therapeutic function. I simply don’t understand why people struggle through the day with a head cold or a migraine or the flu when sleep can help your body get rid of it all. People understand that PCs simply need to shut down once in a while to work out the accumulated bugs and reset themselves. It would seem god wasn’t the only one who created something in its own image. Yet people constantly undermine the intrinsic value of slowing down, recharging batteries and beginning anew.

In short, sleep, to me, is the ultimate victory on the rigid, contrary schedule the adult world tries to impose on me. I claim victory over my alarm clock on Fridays, when I turn off the alarm, and only reluctantly turn it back on on Sunday nights. The bottom line is I enjoy sleep immensely, from the warmth of the blankets pulled tightly under my chin, to finding a cool spot on your pillow on warm summer nights, to glancing at the time and realizing you have two more hours to go before the alarm pulls you from your reverie. *yawn* Gotta go.

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