If you are like me, you have gone to bed as the sun has begun to rise on more than one occasion – in fact it’s a regular thing and you may or not be proud of it. I haven’t been able to go to bed earlier than three or four in the morning since I was in the tenth grade, and for some reason my body seems to manage fine; no regular nap schedule, just a healthy average of four hours to sleep a night. Everyone always talks about how bad they need their naps, or how desperate they are to catch up on sleep, but for me sleep is the obnoxious waste of four to six hours of my life that I wish I didn’t have to participate in.
The amount of productivity that occurs at night is ridiculous, in fact it has become the only time I can manage to get anything done anymore. Everyone around you is usually asleep, the world is silent, and there aren’t any distractions to keep you from studying for your next exam or binging Gilmore Girls until you start to hear the morning birds chirp.
I admit sometimes it would be nice to function like a normal adult, manage to go to bed at eleven at night and sleep soundly for eight to ten hours, but I cannot even image my body participating in such a long stretch of sleep because I haven’t done anything like it for as long as I can remember and I am convinced I am not alone.
There is a high level of camaraderie amongst those of us who don’t sleep, and the friends you have that are awake with you, you must keep close because those extra hours of alone time at night have the potential to get very lonely.
How one survives a sleep schedule like mine, that’s the greatest mystery there is. Why is it that some people need massive amounts of sleep, while others need only a couple of hours? I always think to myself, that maybe I’ve just been so inefficient by way of lack of sleep for so long that I cannot tell the difference, and maybe in a perfect world, that permits a ten hour a night sound sleep, I am the most efficient, intelligent, and energetic human being alive. In reality however, I am okay with the efficiency provided from my current four hours a night, and I would not have it any other way.
People look at me like I am crazy when I talk about how much I sleep a night, but I love the way I do things. Being up to be blanketed by silence and shadows, to think all the thoughts that don’t find time during the day, and to feel more efficient in the amount of things I can get done while the sun is down are things I would never give up.
