Something strange happens every day around two o’clock in the afternoon. An unseen hand brushes over my eyelids, and they grow heavy. The space around me settles into quiet, muffled sounds. My breathing runs shallow. I hear a whisper, “Ten minutes. All you need is ten,” and, boom, I’m out.
The Napping Monster strikes again.
Like the silly old grandma in Audrey Wood’s classic children’s book, I’m so exhausted that I could be buried under heavy objects and still be completely unaware.
Surely I am not alone. Writers fall into two camps, the early bird or the late night owl. And, no matter in which camp you rest, the same question applies: how much sleep (or how little) are you really getting?
At The National Sleep Foundation website, there’s an article that talks about how much sleep we need. It mentions basal sleep and sleep debt and some crazy thing called circadian dips (aka. naptime). There are consequences for too little sleep and fallout after too much sleep, and all I can think of is Goldie Locks and her determined search for all things “just right.”
And, while I don’t spend too much time on the numbers and science of it all, I know that when I settle myself into bed at a reasonable hour and get a full eight hours of sleep, I wake up late the next morning, ragged and hung over.
Let me stay up until the late hours, though, and don’t bug me during those wee ten minutes, and I’m good to go.
What about you? Are you an early bird? A late-night owl? A napper under wraps? What’s your ideal sleep?
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