Back on Tuesday!

Right now, this is a fair approximation of how I feel...

So I'm going to go sleep until Tuesday. Later, gators!

Sloth

No, not this. 

Although it is adorable.

There’s been talk in my home town about switching the school times so the middle and high schools started later and the elementary schools start earlier. Whether or not this is feasible is being debated in the town, but my own reaction was “That would have been soooo awesome if it happened when I was still in school.”

Unfortunately for anyone longing for extra time to sleep in, there are a variety of reasons it might not work. Some are understandable, like how it may push after school practices too late and whether or not students will just end up staying up later, thus negating the whole extra sleep thing. But there are other reasons that are just plain rude. One man claimed parents were coddling their children and refusing to make them get up early like in the “real world.”

I hate the “real world” argument. The whole thing smacks of prejudice. Not every job makes you get up at six a.m. A nurse working the swing shift doesn’t have to get up early. Neither does a writer who works from home. Or a stay-at-home parent whose sleep schedule revolves around a child’s. Do these people not live in the “real world” just because they aren’t the majority?

When I was a teenager, I preferred sleeping until noon and staying up well past midnight. Getting up to go to school was painful for me. It’s not like I didn’t try to sleep more (that is, going to bed earlier) but at the time, I was plagued with pretty bad insomnia. If I went to bed at eleven, I was lucky if I got to sleep at midnight. There were nights that I tossed and turned until two, three, even four in the morning and then I had to trudge to school. Which I did every day, and worked hard for good grades. Same goes for college. Not very lazy for someone who slept past noon on occasion.

So I really don’t like it when people automatically associate late sleeping with laziness. Now I sleep at times that are considered “normal”, but that doesn’t mean I work any more or less hard than someone who stays up until four a.m. and then sleeps until noon.

What say you? What do you think of late sleepers? And what do you think of later school start times for older kids?

Contest Fever

Don’t forget my contest! Information is here. Enter once a day until Sunday at midnight. And share with your friends!

Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the importance of a good night’s sleep. For me, it’s vital. Right now, I feel all bleh because I had a couple of bouts of insomnia lately, and it’s not helping with my writing. My brain doesn’t want to be creative, form an idea, run with it until it becomes a story. It doesn’t want to find all the uses of “was” and “that.” It wants to stare at the TV because I didn’t fall asleep until after one a.m. and woke up at six, tired but for some reason unable to slip back below the surface.

Falling asleep has never been easy for me. Well, maybe it was when I was very little, but I can remember being ten, awake, wondering why I’m tired, I want to sleep, and yet I can’t.

…

Sorry, I just fuzzed out for a little while. Anyway, I can’t pinpoint an exact cause for this terrible affliction. When I was young, I shared a room with my sister and she certainly wasn't any help. Think loud, screaming conversations with her boyfriend. And then in the morning, loud, screaming music as she got ready for school, which started over an hour before mine.

Hm. Making a little more sense now. But even after I got my own room (thank God), I could not fall asleep. It was nice and quiet, but I would crawl into bed at nine and not sleep until after midnight, on a good night. There were times when I was up until two, three, four a.m. and then had to get up to go to school at six twenty. And I can’t even say that was infrequent.

I tried everything: meditation, concentrating on nothing, counting backwards from one hundred visualizing gold letters on black backgrounds. All came with the same result, i.e. bupkis. I wanted to sleep more, but until a doctor actually gave me medication, I just figured I was someone who didn’t fall asleep within twenty minutes of lying down, like how some people can’t process milk. Sure, I wanted to sleep, but I assumed I was destined to a life of feeling slow and dull, like I do right now. One thing, though: it does make me appreciate the fact that my nights are now pretty much all good.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow, I can sit down here and do something. Without it, I can’t do anything properly. It makes me miserable. What is it about sleep, especially dreaming, that is so vital for the brain? It’s known that the day with the lowest rate of heart attacks and car accidents is the day after daylight savings time ends, and the day with the highest is the one where it begins! That extra hour stolen from springtime really helps. 

What about you guys? How important is sleep? And can you be creative without it? I’m curious to know.