We all know someone who never sleeps at night. They are the person you can call at four a.m. just to talk to because you know they will be awake. They are the ones who when you get up for your 8 a.m. class they are just going to sleep for the night. I am one of those people. I can never fall asleep at night. I am basically a nocturnal creature. Now I can’t speak for all the nocturnal humans out there, but I think I speak for most of us when I say it is not something we do on purpose.

For us nocturnal humans, each night at a reasonable time we get in out beds and attempt to go to sleep. Like most people we fluff our pillows to perfection and tuck ourselves in nice and tight with something to drink next to the bed, each night has the makings for a wonderful night sleep. There is minimal light in the room, and soft sounds play from a sleep machine that was purchased to help us sleep peacefully. We are headed from a good night’s slumber, and as soon as we close our eyes our brains decide it wants to have a conversation. For those of you who can just lie down and go right to sleep you don’t know the struggle of getting your brain to shut down so you can sleep. Because I am such nice person I will give you a sample of what happens when I try to sleep. Like I said before everything is going well until you close your eyes. As soon as you close your eyes your brain becomes the most annoying thing you can imagine. It typically goes like this.

*Closes eyes*

Brain: Hey, what are you doing?

You: I’m trying to sleep.

Brain: Oh that’s cool. But before you go to sleep I wanted you see how you felt about our outfit today.

You: It was nice. Now please let me sleep.

Brain: Yeah I thought it was really nice. One more thing before you go to sleep...

This is a trap. When the brain says one more thing, it is never just one more thing. The brain will go on for hours with pointless thoughts. That is just the start of the night, its all downhill from here. After the brain gets tired of talking to you, it decides it wants to play games with your body. First he decides to turn up the temperature.

The entire room goes from like 70 degrees to 1000 in a two-minute span. You start sweating and panting. But you see your brain is a funny guy so as soon as you remove a blanket the temperature magically drops to negative 30 degrees, and as soon as you put the blanket back on it goes back to 1000 degrees. You wrestle with this for a few hours until you finally find a way to stabilize the temperature.

Then the brains final and favorite trick comes along. All of a sudden you cannot get comfortable. Your body just cannot find a position that is comfortable, so you just decide to get out of bed completely and do whatever it is your brain wants you to do until you just collapse from exhaustion. If you are lucky this happens around eight in the morning.

So if you are the type of person who can just fall asleep as soon as you hit the pillow, consider yourself lucky. Not all of us have that ability.