I love sleep. I mean I really, really love sleep. I love sleep like Juliet loved Romeo. I would throw myself in front of a bus for sleep. I need, at minimum, seven hours sleep to be human. I prefer nine or ten. I have been known, on more than one occasion, to sleep up to 15 or 16 hours without so much as a pee break. (And yes, I know that’s obscene in this day and age. Don’t care.)
People often assume that I don’t sleep. People are under this weird assumption that because I am slightly (slightly) type-A, I don’t sleep. People think that because I have a lot of interests and get a fair amount done in the run of my day, I must not be sleeping. People think that because I am energetic, I don’t sleep. People are stupid.
Now, I will confess that there was a time when I didn’t sleep much. When I was in theatre school, it was four or five hours a night, tops. But I managed to supplement this pittance with 10-minute power naps on the smelly couches in the student lounge, massive amounts of 35-cent sludge coffee from the theatre department kitchen, and the occasional doze in the dark of the rehearsal hall. I’ve even taken naps in my car in the Dal parking lot. I didn’t really mind not sleeping then, because I was…well…drunk a lot of the time. At the time, my motto was similar to that of my biodad: “Sleeping is for dead people.”
Then I started developing weird habits. My ex tells me that I used to fall asleep mid-sentence while we were talking in bed. I frequently woke him in the middle of the night with my talking; he would participate in full conversations with me that I wouldn’t remember in the morning because I hadn’t actually been awake. Several times, he caught me walking in my sleep. Once, he found me lying on the kitchen floor in a puddle of blood – in a dream, I’d been cutting the ends off of candles in order to make them fit in the candleholder…and sure enough, on the bloody floor beside me were a tapered candle and a paring knife. My finger healed up okay, though. Doug took a bit longer to recover.
Happily all this strange behavior ended once I was diagnosed with a sleep disorder. I won’t go into all the technical details, but basically, my brain doesn’t make enough sleepy-drug. Most people experience four different levels of sleep, and it’s the fourth phase that makes you feel rested in the morning. I was only going to the third phase (REM sleep, where you experience dreams…and sleep-walking.) So although I was sleeping, I was tired all the time, thus the falling-asleep-mid-sentence thing. Now I take medication that regulates that and I sleep like a normal person.
And OH! How I sleep! Oh, yes, I do.
Sleep is a religious experience for me now. I take it very seriously.
First of all, environment. My bed, I have been told and I truly believe, is the most comfortable bed in the world. It begins with a nice firm mattress. Then you counter the firmness with lots of cush – meaning eggcrate foam topped by a feather bed, topped by crisp white linens (for some reason, sheets must be white for me to be truly, deliciously happy – my favourites being the starched vintage ones trimmed in handmade lace and embroidery inherited from my grandmother.) Sleeping in my bed is like sleeping on a cloud.
Then there is the whole pillow issue. I am quite ridiculous when it comes to my pillow. I panic at the thought of the day my pillow dies and I need to search for a new one. My pillow is light and fluffy and broken in just the right amount. There is no other pillow like my pillow. If a bedmate attempts to use my pillow instead of the three other available pillows, they experience the wrath and quickly learn their place. I have occasionally been tempted to name my pillow, but that would just be silly. Names are for cats and cars and bicycles.
The fact that I work the graveyard shift is not even a problem. My bedroom is equipped with a soft cotton blind that diffuses the sun and simulates dusk. Then I don the all-important black mask that turns the day into night and put in my earplugs, tell myself that I am just like my distant cousin Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (my mask actually has eyelashes, too) and drift off blissfully.
It doesn’t end there, though – oh, no. Sleepy time is when I do some of my best work. In that twilight place before sleep comes, I meditate, I work on my writing (I am able to remember entire chapters the next day, believe it or not), I practice windsurfing maneuvers and skydives and plan my bike routes. I even focus on what I hope to dream about, planting the seeds for good adventures that night.
The only thing I don’t like about sleep is that whole alarm clock thing. I’m still working on that one.
I wish I could marry sleep.
