Let’s not kid ourselves, sleeping is the bomb-dot-com -- so much so that beds, carpets, pull-out couches, and NyQuil were invented as direct offerings to the weary gods. Also, doctors recommend it, so it must be good, but they also more or less recommended bloodletting at one point, so sleep must also not be good. And in this hustle-and-bustle economy, doctors, where can we find the time to fully eat an apple? Would not a plastic package of McDonald’s apple slices suffice? And, tell me, is the caramel dipping sauce commonly associated with said slices is not also essential to a happy, healthy, and rapture-free life? And have I been lied to, tricked by doctors into thinking that an entire apple, stem and all, is what stands between me and certain death?
Nevertheless, sleep is not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, in careful moderation, it’s what provides for an energized, productive tomorrow. One extra hour, though, and you’re screwed, incapable of ascending small flights of stairs and doomed to infuriate Café 1812 baristas with your unpreparedness. No amount of scalding coffee dumped on yourself could be penance enough. But then again, maybe we’re getting too much sleep. Maybe we’re letting ourselves be too unconscious to the world for too long. Sleep is such a strange concept, isn’t it? Go into a room, lie on a softened gym mat, weigh yourself down with multiple blankets, and drop out of the conversation for a few hours just to wake up the next morning, or whenever you wake up, and act like nothing happened.
Essentially, the recommended eight hours is wasted time. We could get by just fine with four. If for some reason you’ve never attempted this irresponsible four-hour sleep, here are a few things to pass the time, assuming it’s past midnight and sleep is your last resort:
- Remember obscure "SpongeBob" quotes.
- Have a cup of coffee.
- Shoot the breeze with the mailman.
- Make an Easy Mac that takes longer to coagulate than eat.
- Hurdle your own leg.
- Debate watching “Rugrats in Paris.”
- Complain when it’s no longer on Netflix.
- Watch “Caillou” instead.
- Just don’t sleep.
Yeah, nine is an odd enough number to end on.
There’s a certain creative madness the night brings that opens seemingly dead-bolted doors shrouded behind a screen during the day. But at night, the staples holding the wire mesh start peeling up, dropping onto the front porch of knowledge, settling beneath the intellectual mailbox, in which, beneath bills, notices, urgencies, and the hindrances of the day, is the key. And behind the door is emptiness, stark, vast emptiness. Clearly no knowledge can exist in a place of nothingness, but there’s everything in nothing. Without the clutter of love seats, worksheets folded naturally by human movement, and discarded water bottles, we have infinite space to draw conclusions, shade in the depth behind key ideas, cross out the fallible logic of the day, and focus on the solution. But like in reality, the board fills up quickly, too quickly for us to take a mental tally of every ingenious spark, because a collective fire would set and disrupt the quiet, universal assonance of night, which is why those fires burn inside us.
