Awakening interest in the beauty of sleep

In some families, the kids inherit looks — a shade of hair, the shape of a mouth — or a talent for athletics or for art. Certain facial expressions in your child and grandchild can make you gasp when you recognize the resemblance and you feel the weight of ancestors, of all who have come before you.

In our family, it’s my mother’s ability to fall asleep in the car. Almost as soon as we’re pulling onto the freeway, she’s nodding off, and then she wakes up refreshed at her destination. From where she’s sitting, it’s almost as if she teleported; no car ride seems too long or too boring.

Traits can skip a generation or two, and Didi has inherited my mother’s talent for dozing — times 10.

Recently, we were all piled in the car, driving to dinner, when he slipped into dreamland. “Let him sleep,” she said. “It’s the sweetest sleep.”

When we teased her about her ability to doze, she contended that she could still register the most important parts of a conversation, and that the mind continuously records, even when asleep.

Didi’s head tilted against his booster seat, his mouth hanging open, his limbs utterly relaxed. But his superpowers are most apparent outside the car. At the neighborhood pool, he contorts himself in the strangest positions before falling asleep. Once, he snoozed in a perfect replica of the matsyasana, or yoga fish pose — his legs crossed, his back arched and his head resting against the slats of the plastic lounge chair. Who needs a feather bed or high-thread-count sheets?

At restaurants, he’ll sometimes nap against our legs, partly in protest over the length of the meals. We try to keep him awake, and yet, I must admit, I enjoy the weight of him asleep on us, that harks back to when he was a babe in arms, and nothing but our embrace would do.

When I’ve traveled to China, I’ve been impressed by local napping capabilities, taken to seemingly Olympic heights. At a museum in Shanghai, a security guard at his desk snoozed upright, his head propped up against a wall. He was brazenly, unapologetically napping, and his balance rivaled that of a tightrope walker’s.

On a visit to a tech startup in southern China, I noticed the lights were dimmed in the main office. “To save energy?” I asked the founder. “Some people are taking naps at lunch” he explained. That’s when I spotted several employees asleep, their heads resting on their folded arms, slumped over their desks.

Their napping didn’t seem like sloth to me. On the contrary, I interpreted it as a sign of how hard they were working otherwise.

Maybe none was getting enough sleep at night. Or maybe they — like Didi — preferred a sleeping pattern that does not follow a long period of wakefulness followed by a long stretch of slumber at night. Some cultures have a tradition of siestas, to rest after lunch, during the hottest part of the day. Here in the Bay Area, I’ve seen nap pods at tech startups, though it’s not clear to me how often or how many workers are partaking (maybe they’re devoted to polyphasic sleep, napping briefly every few hours in lieu of a long overnight stretch).

At times, after I’ve battled with the twins over bedtime — after they’ve asked for water, a snack, another story, a back scratch, a cuddle — or if I find myself awake in the middle of the night, I am comforted remembering that sleeping patterns vary from culture to culture, era to era, and family to family.

Waking up at night may even have an evolutionary advantage. A recent study of the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania found that the adults — who shared common quarters alongside the children — were rarely sound asleep all at the same time. On average, a third of adults were alert or dozing lightly at night.

They didn’t need to post sentinels to keep watch, researchers said, because the sleep patterns ensured at least one person was on guard at all times, whether to tend to a crying baby or to warn of an approaching danger. Yet those surveyed didn’t complain about sleep problems. Compare that to the millions of Americans who take prescription sleep pills or follow elaborate bedtime rituals in search of a good night’s sleep.

I’ve also read how centuries ago, people were in the habit of first and second sleeps — the first began a couple hours after dusk, followed by being awake for one or two hours, when people read, wrote, prayed, or engaged in other nocturnal activities, before falling back asleep. The practice started to disappear after lighting at home and in the streets improved. (Research has also shown that artificial lights suppresses melatonin secretions, which regulates our circadian rhythms.)

May we all sleep like babies — whenever and wherever we can.

Napping didn’t seem like sloth to me. I interpreted it as a sign of how hard they were working otherwise.