Nap Time Everyone

A famous and renowned philosopher and comedian, by the name of George Carlin once remarked, “People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.' So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.”

I am always amazed at what sleep can do for me. It is like having a shower, without the inconvenience of getting wet and going through all the necessary pre- and post-behaviors. Brian Claypool, a very accomplished Canadian rodeo, saddle-bronc and bull rider, who died tragically in May of 1979, once deliberated on the similarities between showering and sleeping. His many travels between rodeos held all over western North America, often left him with very little time to sleep. He said that, “A ten-minute shower is almost the same as having eight hours of sleep – sure, it’s a little messier and you have to take your clothes off, but when you’re busy, it takes a whole lot less time.” And therein, to me, lies the only drawback to sleep. Sleep takes time. A good sleep is measured in hours, the same comparable allotment of time that it would take to read a book or to go skiing or see a movie or fly to Portugal.

Granted, there are times when sleeping seems like a waste of time. When I finally die and report in at the Pearly Gates to St. Peter, chances are that our conversation will not allude to any of the non-adventures I enjoyed while sleeping. That part of my life will probably not be seen as overly-important, even though approximately one third of it will have been spent fully (or partially) engaged in that activity. In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson mentions that, “Even a long human life adds up to only about 650 thousand hours.” If that is indeed the case, then about 220 thousand of those hours will be spent ‘sawing logs’ so to speak. If I die at 75 years of age, I really only will have gotten 50 of those years. In a way, I should maybe feel stiffed – maybe we all should feel that. But we don’t. And, do you know why we don’t? We don’t feel hard-done-by about sleeping away anywhere from 20 to 30 years of our life because of how good it feels to sleep.

When I was a small child, I thought constantly, and almost entirely, about candy. Once I reached adolescence, and until about the age of 65, my mind was preoccupied with sex. Now that I have reached the age normally associated with retirement, senior's discounts and the desire for healthy and painless bowel movements, I am obsessed mostly with sleep. There are many nights where I pray I will not fall asleep the instant my head hits the pillow, just so I can feel the immense pleasure of lying down in bed and just letting the tensions and troubles of the day sink into the mattress beneath me. I sigh and I groan and sometimes moan with ecstasy and joyful exhilaration as I absorb the near-sensual intoxication of that twilight period just prior to ‘giving in’ to sleep. My Uncle Harry used to set his alarm to ring at several different times during the night, so he could wake up, only to, once again, immerse himself in the pleasure found in those few moments just before nodding off. I, for one, am convinced that the cosmic reason why, at this point in my life, I am necessarily forced to pee three or four times during the night, is so that I can experience that same enjoyment every time I get back into bed. God decreased the size of my bladder and increased the size of my prostate so that I could ultimately bathe in the relaxation of pre-sleep, more often through the course of the night.

When I was much younger, maybe not much past the age where my memory finally kicked in, I was not a big fan of sleep. Sleeping meant that I was going to miss something. Maybe I would miss an extra hour of play time or a funny television program. Maybe I would miss some time with a visiting aunt or cousin or friend. I recall my year of life when I was in Grade One. The rule in our house regarding bed-time for Grade-one kids on a school night was – at 7:00 pm it was time to get ready to go to bed and, whatever that entailed, like bath-time, brushing teeth, saying prayers, etc., etc. By 7:30, anyone in in the first grade (namely me), would have to be physically in bed, maybe with a book or a stuffed toy or a deck of collectable trading cards or whatever. At 8:00 pm, the bedroom door was closed and my day was done. The year that I was in Grade-one, my brother was still young enough to have not yet started school and, my sister was in Grade-five. My bed-time rules were not the same bed-time rules that governed the evening lives of my siblings. My brother did not have to go to bed until he fell asleep mid-sentence and/or mid-stride on the living room floor necessitating the parenting actions of one of the adults of the household to disrobe him, stuff him into a pair of pajamas and put him in bed. Being the oldest child and being in Grade-five and being a girl, my sister was allowed to go to bed whenever she wanted. All of this meant that, for example, on June 21st, when the sun finally set at 10 pm and the sky was still bright and light at midnight, my brother and sister would be noisily playing some exciting game with all the farm animals we owned, just outside the window of my bedroom where I had been trying my damnedest to sleep for the last three hours. Have you ever paused to reflect on the futility of TRYING to go to sleep? Sleeping was the bane of my existence when I was a kid.

Even when I was a teenager in my senior year in High School and then on into my college years, I didn’t really like the thoughts of sleep. Sleep still interfered with my social life and with the things I wanted to do. I liked the idea of having pretty-much a full 24 hours per day at my disposal. It wasn’t until I began working for a living that I really started to appreciate the need for, and the opportunity to, get a good night's sleep. The full-time physicality of livestock farming brought with it the absolute need to sleep. Not only did I sleep well at night, but I also began to build routines of sleeping after lunch. On summer days, I used siesta rituals during the hot part of the afternoon or evening. These routines and rituals almost never included a regular bed however, so they did not bring with them the pleasure of conscious pre-sleep relaxation. Post lunch-time and mid-afternoon sleep-breaks were most often taken while sitting in a wooden chair at the kitchen table or on two straw bales strategically positioned end-to-end in the barn loft, or while bent into some unnatural body-configuration on the seat of a truck or tractor. The sleeps were often painful and short-lived and usually resulted in long-lasting, red skin indentations on one’s forehead or cheeks. I recall one instance where I decided to catch ‘40 winks’ while doing some post lunch-time field work on the tractor. I parked the tractor facing into a bluff of trees that could offer a bit of shade as I slept. Because the tractor had a diesel engine, I left it running while I slept. After only a few minutes of sleep and major discomfort caused by contorting my body, I opened my eyes. On noticing that the tractor I was driving, was still running, and was heading directly into a bluff of trees, I sat bolt-upright, simultaneously slammed my left foot on the clutch pedal while jamming my right foot onto the brake pedal all in an effort to keep my stationary 100-thousand-dollar tractor from crashing into the trees. Oh wait . . . yeh, that’s right . . . I wasn’t moving . . . I was having a sleep . . . whoa!!! Anyway, the sudden rush of adrenaline through my system, woke me up and kept me going for sometime after that – sort of the same as when you, for real, fall asleep at the wheel of a moving vehicle and then wake up on the wrong side of the road – but a lot less dangerous, of course.

Eventually, I got married and had kids. I refer to that time of my life as the “what-the-hell-is-sleep?” years. My mother once telephoned me to see how I was doing. I was so exhausted from chasing kids around, that I fell asleep while she was telling me some story about something. I don’t know how long I dozed off for, but when I woke up, she had moved on to a story about the brother of the friend she was talking about originally. Whatever extra sleep I may have scrounged during my farming years, I more that lost in my parenting years. Parenting was tough on sleep. Every picture I see of a new father with his young kids, the father always has one eye closed and the other at half mast. Things improved only slightly when I began teaching.

During my teaching career, I often found myself performing late-night sessions of correcting and marking tests and assignments. The later it got, the more often I would nod off during the evaluation of one of the student papers. Each time I nodded off, the red pen I was holding in my hand would touch down on the test paper or assignment and make some sort of an incoherent squiggly line across the page. On receiving their assignments back, my students would often compare the marks on their papers to see whose paper was corrected last or at the latest hour. The more squiggles on the page, the later in the evening it was corrected – which meant more scrutiny was needed on the student’s part, as there would be a greater likelihood of errors in marking. Over 32 years of teaching, I was always taken by what great detective work students were capable of.

Cat-naps, power-naps, afternoon naps, snoozes or siestas – whatever you want to call them, they do us all a world of good. Some people I know can have a ten-minute sleep, which I like to refer to as a ‘petit mal seizure’, and then come back to life, fully refreshed. I find it difficult to get anything at all out of a short ’40 winks’. For a sleep to do me any good at all, I need to be able to stretch out fully, preferably on one side or the other and with a blanket of some sort over top of me. I also need to know that I have at least one hour to play with, regarding sleep time. As alluded to earlier, I need 5 minutes of guilt-free gloating time when I first lie down, and then 50 minutes of actual sleep time, all finished off with 5 minutes of “where-the-hell-am-I?” time when I wake up. If I can get that sort of afternoon nap under my belt, I am indeed ready to meet the remainder of the day.

I lived in a city of 11 million people in the heart of China (Wuhan), for eight years. Wuhan is often referred to as one of the three ‘Furnaces’ of China. Beginning as early as April every year and lasting until October, day-time temperatures can reach as high as 45 degrees Celsius. That kind of heat, coupled with extremely high humidity can really take its toll on a person. I was a teacher in a large private high-school. I tried to keep my classroom as cool as possible during the scorching spring, summer and autumn months so that students would be able to find my classes at least somewhat bearable. In all parts of China, the citizens have a reputation for taking afternoon (or morning, or evening) naps. It is not uncommon to see police officers sleeping in their vehicles pulled over to the side of busy traffic streets. Market vendors and shop owners could often be found leaning back in a chair behind the counter or stretched out on a mat on the floor, eyes closed, heads back and mouths wide-open. Security guards and commissionaires seldom made it through a work-day without bombing-out at least once or twice. Because of the heat mostly, this slumber-time behavior was especially prevalent in Wuhan, where I lived. The students in our school were definitely part of the culture. Some schools in Europe and North America are plagued with problems of student misbehavior, vandalism, bullying, absenteeism and even violence. The most common grievance about students in our school was that they would often fall asleep in class. A combination of extreme humid heat and a culture of napping, often led to student-sleeping. During my time there, I witnessed everything from students snoring, to seeing them fall off chairs to having to shake them at the end of class to get them out of the room. I saw students pull their heads up off their desks with any variety of pens, paper and plastic rulers stuck to their rosy cheeks, or with cell phone and wrist-watch impressions in their foreheads and streams of drool, dripping from the corners of their mouths forming shimmering little pools on the surface of their work-spaces. I always tried to provide enough activity and variation in my classes to keep the students from sleeping, but sometimes it happened anyway. When a student or students would fall asleep in my class, I would silently signal to the rest of the class to start applauding. The sleeping member of class would most often lift their head up quickly and begin clapping as well – much to the delight of the non-sleepers in the class. Occasionally, I would signal for students to take photos of the ‘sleepers’ with their phones and we would print them out and hang them on our “Sleeper Wall of Fame”. One of my favorite responses to sleeping students in my classes was to signal the rest of the students in the class to, as silently as possible, get up from their desks, leave the classroom and go outside and observe the sleeping student(s) through the windows. I never disciplined my students for sleeping in class – I always felt that maybe I was partly responsible because I had presented a boring class that day. I also knew what it was like to try and stay awake through hours of excruciating heat and humidity. So, the most I could do with good conscience, was to have some fun with it. Over the course of a school year, sooner or later, everyone got to be in on the joke.

Throughout my life, I have slept in all sorts of beds, chairs, couches and hammocks. I have slept on water beds (even some that leaked), bare ground, cold cement, in sleeping bags, in tree-houses and in car trunks. Some of these experiences were terrible, but none as bad as trying to sleep in the middle chair of a three-seat combination in the economy section of an airplane making a 14-hour flight from some airport in North America to some other airport in Asia. I have never been able to do more than close my eyes on such a flight. I have always envied those who seem to sleep, in any one of several different uncomfortable body positions for the entire 14 hours. Some appear to be asleep when they get on the plane and then stay that way until they disembark half a day later. How do they do that? I have literally taken hundreds of flights, on dozens of different airlines, all over the world. And, you know what? I have never once sat in an economy seat that reclines even one quarter as far back as the seat of the person in front of me. That little problem alone has always made it almost impossible for me to catch even a short nap. According to unwritten rules of airplane etiquette, people sitting in middle seats in economy class are entitled to both armrests on either side. Because of the extra comfort and / or viewing amenities afforded the outside and inside passengers in the row, these guys are allowed to use only their outside or window armrests respectively. Unfortunately, I have also never once been on a flight, where anyone but me knows the first thing about airplane etiquette. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that it is impossible for me to sleep at all, on board a commercial flight.

In conclusion, I have come to realize that, in my nearly 70 years on the planet, I genuinely enjoy a good 8-10-hour sleep in a semi-stretched-out, on-my-side position on a medium-soft, yet firm mattress covered with a quilted mattress cover and soft bamboo sheets and then topped off with another bamboo sheet and a heavy fleece-filled duvet, and with my head on a single 8-inch semi-soft foam pillow. In spring, autumn and winter, I love to get into a warm bed and get out of a cool one. In the summer, I like the feel of cool sheets with a gentle breeze blowing over me. If I can get those kind of conditions for sleep, then I am pretty much assured of getting the kind of sleep I need, to be at least close to the reasonable person my dog thinks I am. I like being that kind of person and, I like the way people around me react when I am that kind of person. So, I am going to resolve this year to get all my ducks in a row and do what I need to do to secure those items which will allow me to get the sleep I need to wake up as – a NICE GUY!!