Do not disturb my glorious sleeping
According to my abacus, if you sleep eight hours a night, you will spend a third of your life sleeping. That’s right. Thirty-three percent of your life will be spent asleep, not doing anything productive for society, or even worse, yourself. If you live to be 75 years old, 25 of those years will be spent snoozing.
I know — you’re thinking what I’m thinking: What a waste of time that I spend twothirds of my life awake.
How much do I love sleeping? Well, a number of years ago, I watched a movie just because I thought it was about sleeping. The movie was called “Inception,” and while a very inventive and creative film, it’s not really about sleeping. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot if you haven’t seen it (especially the ending, where all the characters die in a fiery plane crash), but it’s about a guy (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) who plugs himself into
other people’s dreams to steal their secrets. I found the movie to be implausible, but not because Dicaprio and his cohorts were able to enter into other people’s dreams through some technology. If they can make jeans out of pajama fabric, anything is scientifically possible.
No, the notion that I found farfetched is that when they entered someone’s dream, the dream made sense. All the people in the dreams were of the same era, in places that were logical, etc.
From my own experience, that’s just absurd. If they had entered a real dream of mine, for example, they would find me walking down the street in my present-day hometown, naked, joined by my third-grade teacher, a college classmate, that “Balki” guy from the “Perfect Strangers” television show and a leprechaun riding a horse. Then a tornado with Chuck Woolery’s face on it would barrel down the street, stop in front of us and start speaking to us in Latin about the difference between catsup and ketchup. That’s a real dream.
And, no, I’m not on heroin. One of the greatest things about sleeping is what I call the “false wakeup.” It may produce the best feeling the world has ever known.
This occurs when you wake up naturally and think it’s time to begin your day, which, for me usually starts at 6:30 a.m. But when I look at the alarm clock, it says 3:45 a.m.
“Ahhh,” I bellow aloud, waking up the rest of the house as I fall back into a peaceful slumber, relieved, no, ecstatic, that I have nearly three more hours of dormancy than originally believed.
I try not to awake for anything. I find it disturbs my sleep. I don’t answer phone calls, don’t answer cries of children, or adults, or law enforcement and never have insomnia. Sometimes, though, a loud noise in the night will awake me.
“That sounds just like robbers breaking into the house,” I think to myself, alarmed for an instant. I then regain my sanity. “Probably not,” I mumble, then return to my joyful stupor.
Listen, or read, if you’re going to spend 33 percent of your life doing something, you might as well be the best at it. Why even try to sleep if you aren’t going to strive for excellence?
That’s my policy, which coincidentally, jibes with my policy of being lazy whenever possible.
Good night, awake readers, I’m shooting for 38 percent of my life asleep for the rest of 2019. Please do not disturb.