Embrace dark, sacred night

I can’t get to bed soon enough. Early enough. Often enough.

This might be the best time of year. Best for sleeping. Best for knocking out eight, 10 and 12 hours at a stretch. If sleeping is healing, then let the healing commence.

Cool and dark makes for good sleeping weather. Cool and dark is the siren’s call. Cool and dark is the voice from our bedrooms that says: “Come to bed. You are loved here. We will wrap you up and not let go.”

Desire for sleep starts at dusk, accelerates during dinner and peaks after watching an episode of space adventure “Away” on Netflix. Watch another one? Preposterous. That could put you in bed past 8 p.m. and in the winter, 8 p.m. is like college and pulling an all-nighter.

Look at the clock. You’ve had a drink, eaten dinner, been entertained, in other words, been unusually productive, and when you look at the clock, it’s not 7 yet. It’s easy to make a case for going to bed by 8, but 7 is early even for early. However, sometimes early is just what the sleep doctor ordered when he sees the breadth of healing that has to take place.

Why are we so tired? Have we changed professions and taken jobs throwing bundles of shingles on roofs or building cinder block walls? I suspect not and many of us are doing what we’ve always done, which is somewhere between working hard and hardly working, but regardless this exhaustion feels like jet lag after returning from a trip to Indonesia.

Go to bed. Don’t fight it. If this has been an unusually unproductive day, then why not get an early jump on an equally unproductive day tomorrow.

Pause at the door. Look at the bed. Has anything ever looked better?

Before removing the decorative pillows and pulling back the sheets, the winter sleeper has decisions to make:

Warm bedroom or cool? Warm is fine but a cool room and a bed topped with a down comforter is hard to beat. Having heft in your bedding is like one of those X-ray protection blankets they place on your chest in the dentist’s office. The challenge with heavy bedding is it makes getting up in the middle of the night seem like a lot of work so you might as well just wet the bed.

I haven’t done that but winter, a cool room and heavy covers could make you revert to behavior you thought you’d outgrown when you were 2.

I prefer a cold room because with warmth, you risk the chance of vapor lock, where the air gets hotter than a Southern summer night and you could end up bursting through a sliding glass door like William Hurt in “Body Heat” to get some relief.

Warm or cold, go to bed early in case you have one or two fits of wakefulness due to an alarming medical condition or some incurable neurosis. Then you’ve budgeted enough time to get what professional sleepers call “their proper rest.”

A long sleep should be like an NBA game, if you blow the first quarter you always have the subsequent quarters to redeem yourself. Occasionally you pull off the golden sleep where every period is good and when you wake up and the clock says 2, it’s not a problem because you already have six hours in the bank and the bank is still open for additional deposits.

When I think about winter sleep, I hear Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World.” “I see skies of blue And clouds of white The bright blessed day The dark sacred night And I think to myself What a wonderful world.” A dark sacred night never has seemed more sacred than right now.