The Pseudoscience Of Sleep

I know that this runs contrary to a point I make early on, but I never find images that tie into my topic this well.

Perhaps you’re such an obsessive fan of my blog that, every time you finish an article, you lament that you’ll have to wait another 2/3 days to read run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things. Perhaps, in this post-reading desperation, you start scouring my update for anything else to read from which you can glean some sort of humor or insight on my life. Perhaps, while doing this, you notice that my update was posted at an obscenely early hour of the morning. So if you’ve ever been wondering why that is, Mom and Dad, do please allow me to explain by way of run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things.

I hate the thought of calling myself a ‘night owl’* because I have it in my head that anybody who self applies a cliché term like that is trying to posture his or herself as suave and alternative, and is thus a tool. Also, the term, clichéd as it is, tends to describe somebody who is out all night dancing it up at nightclubs and hitting all the trendy bars – so, y’know, a tool – and those are most certainly not things that I do when I’m staying up late. My late nights usually consist of me in front of the computer exploring the Internet (there’s this great new site out of Mexico where they do webcam broadcasts of donkey shows as they happen) or laboriously adding on to the now 450 page monstrosity that is my novel. Sometimes, hummus is involved. ‘Night owls’ do not do these things. The term that best describes me after dark is ‘Late Night Loser’.

*Unless I’m comparing myself to the lovelorn alternate-1985 Batman parallel Night Owl 2 from Watchmen, that is! Please allow me to congratulate the three other hopeless nerds who got that joke as I slowly alienate the rest of my considerably cooler fanbase.

There was a time when I considered staying up until midnight to be really late. Eighth grade has come and gone, however, and now I consider going to bed at or before midnight to be a bizarre and alien ritual. As I progressed through high school, I further pushed the boundaries of when I deemed it necessary to go to bed – 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM… 3:15 is about my limit now, but I have been known to go to 3:30. Of course, I only stay up this late when I don’t have any pressing engagements or classes the following morning – on those nights, I’m definitely in bed by 2:00.

I don’t want to be this way. I don’t think anybody really does - there’s no pride to be taken in staying up really late doing nothing in particular. I didn’t put it on my resume – “Surfed Newgrounds.com until 3:00 AM the day before a final exam” – and I don’t think I’d win a medal for it. But the point is, even as I’m sitting up late, reading the latest biased election news on Digg or learning about bizarre and fascinating serial killers on Wikipedia, I’m thinking, “This is getting you nowhere. You’d be better off sleeping. You’re bored anyway – just go to sleep!” But no matter how hard I try to stop reading about the Zodiac Killer and go to bed, it never seems to work. It’s like I’m addicted to not sleeping, only I don’t think you can be addicted to the absence of something. Every single day of my life I’ve not done a line of cocaine – am I addicted to anti-cocaine?

What’s more likely is that my brain is addicted to thinking*. When I’m asleep, I’m not thinking, and my brain just won’t tolerate that, so it prods me into staying up late by making it physically impossible to step away from the Internet – which, if things to think about are drugs, is the ghetto. For instance, even as I write this I’m cruising through the intersection of Wikipedia Boulevard and Penny Arcade Lane in hopes of finding my dealer.

*Sometimes, I consider making T-shirts with lines from my blog on them, and “My brain is addicted to thinking” would probably be the first one. Honestly, having just written the words “My brain is addicted to thinking”, I feel as though my life has taken a turn of sorts. Not necessarily in the right direction.

The side effect of staying up so late is that I usually sleep in until noon or so, which makes me feel like something of a spoiled debutante when I come downstairs for breakfast only to find out that breakfast is lunch, and I missed lunch. As I stand over the counter eating my midday meal (which usually consists of peanut butter and bread, not necessarily in that order), I resolve to go to start going to bed earlier so that I can get up earlier and not miss out on as much of my day.

But, just like my plan to microwave a cold stick of butter to soften it up, this fails catastrophically. Even if I can raise myself from my desk chair and get into bed at a reasonable hour, the simple fact is that I only really woke up 11 hours ago and won’t be tired for another four. So then I just lie in bed, in the dark, thinking – and thinking will totally cockblock sleep, every time – until I run out of things to think about and am just a bored, very awake person in the dark, at which point I go to the computer for another four hour long fix.

The logical way to solve this problem is to set my alarm clock for an early hour and get up at that hour, regardless of how tired I am, and then go about my day so that I’ll be sufficiently tired to fall asleep at a normal hour, thus getting myself back onto a normal sleeping schedule and gradually recovering a shred of my long lost humanity. However, this is tough to do, because when my alarm wakes me up at 9:00 AM, I’ve had four hours of sleep, and I don’t have an expensive and possibly educational class to go to, I cross everything off of my morning agenda and replace it with “Get more sleep – starting NOW”.

There have been a few, ever so precious mornings when I’ve been able to rouse myself early, shake off the urge to go back to sleep, and start going about my business for the day. I can’t distinctly remember these mornings, though, because they were incredibly boring. My first instinct, with the entire day stretching out ahead of me, is to call my friends and see if we can get together and do something. However, at 9:00 AM a lot of my friends who aren’t at work are still sleeping, because most of them are Late Night Losers too. Desperate not to go back to sleep but with nobody to occupy my attention, I head for my computer and start surfing the Internet or plugging away at the ‘ol novel.

When I do those things in the middle of the night I’m not nearly as sleepy.

Truman Capps reminds you that non-losers do anti-cocaine.