Ever since I was a little kid, I've wanted to be an astronaut. The first and obvious reason for this was because I would get to go to space. Who wouldn't want to do that? Being a space traveler would be one more thing that I'd have in common with Darth Vader. Plus, with that on my resumé, how is Petco going to deny my application? I would also be the coolest parent at career day, when Stevie's dentist parents smell like toothpaste, and I'm handing all the kids moon rocks. Unfortunately, I don't think I could handle being away from family, friends, and Netflix for the amount of time that those dudes are floating up there. However the other day, after one of my tests, I took what I thought would be a nap. Instead, I hibernated and missed a whole day of my life.

Let me give you a little context, so you don't sit there thinking, "Damn, this guy should go to a hospital instead of typing a story about it." I wasn't sick or on an unhealthy dose of Lunesta. I had just taken a titanic test. You know that you took a titanic test, when you finish the test, turn it in, walk outside of the classroom, drop to your knees, and cry in a fetal position like Kate Winslet did when she dropped Leonardo Dicaprio into the freezing Atlantic. After you achieve this level of peril and hopelessness, you too can take a 24-hour nap.

Of course, during the 24 hours, I had been awakened a few times. Every time I woke up, however, I looked out my window to see a dark sky. This is a symbol for smooth sleeping amongst the sleep people. With this sight, I went back to bed without thinking twice. What I didn't realize was that my shades were down and that it wasn't actually night time.

I could have stayed in that bed for months if it hadn't been for my neighbor. If you ask him, he'll tell you that he's a musician. This is the equivalent of calling one of your little cousins who plays with Legos a commercial architect. Don't get me wrong, if you have a dream and you follow through with it, you will achieve it with the glory of the gods! But when it's time to practice, do it indoors. People who practice Kung Fu don't go out on the street and tiger choke people who are walking to work. People who practice music should follow the ways of Kung Fu and stay indoors. Luckily for me, I was woken up by my neighbor's practice before he made it to Carnegie Hall.

I woke up and yelled, “WHAT YEAR IS IT?!" and before long, I realized that the crowd around me from my dream was gone. Damnit. I was just at Carnegie Hall playing a jammin banjo, and now I'm in my bed? I looked at my phone and realized there's no way I had slept for 24 hours and 2 minutes. If there was a deadbeat marathon, I had just crossed the finish line. I ran to the bathroom, wondering if the man I saw in the mirror would look like the guy on my ID card. To my relief, Tom Hanks from Cast Away wasn't looking back at me. But still! 12 missed calls? 31 unread texts? 2 voicemails? What's the most that could have happened in 24 hours and 2 minutes? Judging from the fact that I've only had two voicemails on my cell phone during the year 2015, it meant that I had missed a lifetime of events.

That is, by far, the worst part about sleeping through a day. I know when you wake up from a cool dream like Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz, you want to tell everybody about how you melted a witch and helped a talking scarecrow get a brain. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't give a crap, because it never happened. In reality, you have missed an incredible amount of life! If you sleep for a whole day and night, that means that you inadvertently went a whole day without eating.

You won't feel like you did this when you wake up, but the minute one of my buddies pointed this out, hunger fell on me like the green slime from Nickelodeon's "Slime Time Live." I also missed a bunch of class time. This could be a good thing, though. Whenever I do something detrimental to my education, like getting an F on my titanic test or sleeping through a whole day of class, I overcompensate with school work. This means that even though my teacher didn't see me for a couple of days, they won't be able to get rid of me for the next 4 weeks. Now everybody wins!

Luckily, my mom handled this like any other reasonable and loving parent would: by having a full-on panic attack. After 3 missed calls, she came to the obvious conclusion that I was kidnapped by ISIS and that she should check with my roommate. A conversation, I could only imagine, went like this:

*iPhone rings*

Roommate looks at his friend, sitting on the couch next to him: "Dude it's Donny's mom... Wuh?"

Roommate puts down Xbox controller: "Hello?"

Donny's mom: "Hi sweetie, I don't mean to interrupt whatever you're doing, but have you seen Donny around?"

*Roommate looks at locked door and realizes the amount of time that has passed (17 hours) since I told him that I was going to take a quick nap and to wake me up before he finished watching Marvel's Daredevil (roommate also realizes that he didn't wake me up to finish Daredevil)

Roommate: "Uhhhhh... He's asleep"

*7.7 seconds of silence*

Roommate: "Mrs. Sullivan?"

Donny's mom: "Sorry, did you say asleep?"

I love my mom.

Maybe it's not all that bad to sleep for 24 hours and 2 minutes. Bears sleep for a whole season and they turn out to be 1-ton killing machines. In The Mummy, Imhotep was asleep for thousands of years and he got a ton of cool zombie powers out of it. And in Sleeping Beauty, the princess literally sleeps through the worst parts of the story. Seriously -- the dragon, the sword fight, all of it. She didn't have to deal with anything that sucked in that story.

But I guess bears are endangered. And Brendan Fraser did send that mummy back to the crypt. And how bad would it suck, to be the guy who slept during the only mythical dragon fight in human history? I think next time I'll set an alarm.