Nap Time
It’s late Sunday afternoon, and I just woke up from a nap.
I never thought I would say such a thing with such pleasure. I recall reading Blondie as a child, and wondering why Dagwood Bumstead was always trying to take a nap. What was the matter with him? What was the point? But now I understand. It seems that every month or two there’s a story in the news about someone’s research showing that most Americans are short on sleep. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly am, and it’s been this way for most of my adult life.
When there’s a baby in the house a certain amount of getting up in the night is inevitable. I expected that once our last child was out of that stage the sleep schedule would stabilize. Perhaps if I had the personality and authority of a military drill instructor it would have happened, but I don’t, and it didn’t. It wasn’t just that the children didn’t want to go to bed: my wife was, if not on their side, then overly sympathetic to it, being a night owl herself, and a bit of an anarchist where schedules and routines are concerned. (It’s in the genes: her father said that his own mother could sometimes be found doing housework at one in the morning.) One way or another bedtime usually ended up being an hour or two later than needed to give me the seven or eight hours of sleep that I need to be reliably alert the next day.
And so for most of the past three decades I’ve found myself sinking into drowsiness at times when I shouldn’t be—sometimes wishing for sleep, sometimes having to vigorously fight it off while at my desk, or, worse, in a meeting, or, worst of all, while driving. I now assume that the usual and fairly quick result of the combination of physical inactivity and boredom is likely to be sleep, especially after about noon or so, and avoid such situations as much as possible. Some years ago I attempted a daily regimen of prayer to the Holy Spirit which included attempting to empty the mind for five minutes. I gave it up because I always started nodding off after a minute or two.
Later, as the children grew up and left home, I thought surely it would become possible to get enough sleep regularly to be freed from the constant drowsiness—there would not be, for instance, the distraction of having a number of people on different schedules in one small house. But it hasn’t happened, even though our youngest went off to college last fall. At least five nights out of seven find me still going to bed too late, spending too much time in the evening online or reading or watching a movie, then starting the bedtime chores (taking the dogs out, etc.) when I should already be asleep. It wouldn’t be honest of me to say I can’t help myself, and to blame it all on the technological supports for this behavior, beginning with electricity. But it is true that without them I would almost certainly not stay awake so long; reading by lamplight, unless it were a pretty exciting story, would not produce the nervous energy aroused by watching television or reading blogs. Nor can I plausibly blame it on my wife, although that would be nice.
And so I arrive at a moment like this afternoon. We had taken an overnight trip to visit our daughter at college, and got up early this morning to go to Mass. We left around one for the three-hour drive home. I managed to remain reasonably alert on the drive by drinking extra coffee and listening to a book on cd. The book wasn’t interesting enough to keep my wife from dozing off, which I encouraged her to do, in case I should need her to drive. I didn’t, but after we got home and had a bite to eat the pall of drowsiness began to gather.
This happens so often at times when I’m obliged to fight it that the opportunity to give in to it is not to be missed. To close one’s eyes when really sleepy is as great a pleasure as to drink when thirsty and eat when hungry. The need is so powerful that, as we know from recent events, sleep deprivation can be used as a form of torture (and let’s not pretend that it isn’t that). There was no household task that required immediate attention, nowhere we had to be for the rest of the day. I got comfortable on the couch and thought This one’s for you, Dagwood before dropping blissfully into oblivion for half an hour or so.
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