An Eye-Opening Eye Closing

I like sleeping. A whole lot. In fact, I would go so far as to consider it one of my favorite pastimes (right up there with video games, baseball, and eating to excess). I've been finding that, as a graduate student, a great change has come over me since my undergrad days with regards to this noble activity.

Back then, I loved sleeping, and would frequently nap in the afternoons and sleep on weekends and days off until some time that was, more often than not, followed by "pm". Granted, at that point, I was going to bed at times when television frequently shows little more than Billy Mays infomercials. There was nothing wrong with this arrangement in the eyes of anyone except the parents paying for what they presumed was an education being sorely wasted by my abysmal sleeping schedule. (My degree showed them...ha!)

But now, as I'm beginning to develop into what I can only call by the term "an old man," I'm finding that my inclination towards sleeping has, if nothing else, shifted back a few hours. When I'm in State College, attempting (that being the operative word) to be productive, I start to really get tired right around the pm-am switchover, and typically start to crave the comfort of my flannel sheets around 1:00am. As an undergrad, this is shameful; but as a grad student, with no one else's expectations to have to tolerate or satiate, I have no problem with this bedtime at all. Consequently, I find it very hard to sleep past 10:00am most mornings, even on weekends, if I manage to make it that long. This very weekend, in fact, after a much-needed night of restful sleep in my own (much tinier) bed, I could only manage to top out at around 9:30am.

And on Easter Sunday, I was up before my brother, which I assure you is quite the accomplishment. See, as a kid, I never slept in -- had to wake up early and play Nintendo before the parents woke up and caught me, after all -- and my brother would routinely maintain unconsciousness for several hours after I'd given up the game. We reversed roles for a few years when I was in college and he was working the five-days-a-week gig, but it's starting to look like the tides may be turning yet again.

Now, in fairness, he does a shit ton more during his average day than I do in mine -- and, in fact, I suspect the mostly sedentary nature of my present lifestyle is attributing to my desire to constantly be going to sleep -- but this whole sleeping thing has me awfully fascinated as of late. Especially because, over the past week or so, I'd been sleeping very restlessly without having anything on my hand or hanging over my head -- as you'll recall from the previous post, I exorcised that demon last week -- and only in the past day or two has that remedied itself.

I even found myself in the strange position, last night, of doing something I'd successfully being able to only during the last six months or so: having a dream, waking myself from it, and being able to fall asleep again and resume it. I made this happen during the fall semester a few times, and during all of these episodes, I had convinced myself that part of the dream was the belief that I'd woken up and fallen back asleep, thus not disrupting the continuity. But when I was able to resume the dream twice in the same night, it was too creepy to write off. This particular accomplishment has me rather curious because we've all had those dreams that we wished wouldn't end, as well as those that seemed poised to reach a climax when they are interrupted by, say, the regrettable droning of the alarm clock in the morning. Does it make me [more] fucked up [than normal] that I can occasionally do this? Is there a non-crackpot psychological explanation for why I can do this in the first place?

I realize that I've gone on at length here about my sleeping habits, with little or no indication of direction or purpose. This is all very true. I was inspired to think about these things earlier today, during my office hours, when the girl sitting next to me in the library fell asleep three times during the two hours I was next to her.

There are a few caveats due here. Firstly, I do my office hours in the library's Humanities Reading Room, which is a very long room consisting of two rows of rather comfortable plush chairs and ottomans. This presents a problem at most hours of the day when seeking a seat, since at least half those chairs are occupied by oddly-contorted unconscious undergrads. No matter what time of day you go. Even if it's roughly an hour after most people have woken up -- because, seriously, who the fuck naps at 11:00am?

Now, I was in this room at 2:00pm, which is prime nap time, as far as I'm concerned. But this girl wasn't like many others who take out notebooks and sheets of paper as mere pretense for their dozing: those fakers can be found curled up with their jackets draped over them like blankets and the "work" they were doing stacked neatly on the small tables next to the chairs. No, these folks are all about show. The true passed-out workers are found in the same manner in which I found my collegiate colleague when I took the chair next to her: a book half in hand, half on the cushion, slumped over as if her neck were snapped, glasses and earbuds ever so slightly askew against her head. This was, doubtless, a girl who couldn't stay awake while reading.

(Which I found to be atrocious because, when she regained consciousness and her book moved, I could see she was reading Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. And while I'll be the last to admit that any of my recreational pleasures are remotely near normal, I have to confess that being curled up in a plush chair with a Philip Roth novel would be downright heavenly.)

I found her asleep, I would leave her asleep. But twice during my tenure in the chair, she would awaken and resume her work -- a pattern that has astonished me all along. Because while my own productivity overall is neither admirable nor commendable, I wonder why this girl couldn't stay focused for long enough to get through a few stories.

I was forced to consider a few possibilities: that her sleep schedule was even more fucked up than my own, and she was fighting sleep as best she could to no avail; that she was simply managing her time poorly, something that I'm not good at either but that has improved over time; or, most likely of all, that I was simply being a curmudgeonly old fart who has forgotten already how good he had it as an undergrad.

And what freaked me out most of all was that, no matter which of these options I chose, they all pointed to the same general symptom: goddamn it, I'm getting old.

So that was what I learned today. I'm going to go back to trying to regain a little of my youth. By drinking Scotch, watching Food Network, and then going to bed...soon...

I'm too far gone already, aren't I?