Sleep

Sunday, March 7th was the first day of National Sleep Awareness Week, and, predictably, I was woken out of a dream at 6 o’clock in the morning by the unremitting sound of a car alarm going off on the street outside my window.

Subsequently, I stumbled onto the fact that it was Sleep Awareness Week when I realized I couldn’t possibly go back to bed and decided, rather crabbily, to just get up. So I went into the kitchen to heat some water for tea and turned on the radio. That’s when I heard the good news.

I must say I have nothing against sleep. In fact, I’m a big fan. But the idea of a Sleep Awareness Week intrigued me and I went online—since I was already up—and did a little research.

It turns out that sleep awareness is a big thing. In fact, I discovered a sleep blog, by a trained polysomnographic technician, and sleep care centers with sleep care professionals. Additionally, there is an online community of...sleepers?...where you can share your experience with sleep and sleep disorders. And, of course, there is a cyber sleep shop for your various sleeping needs, and, while hard to imagine, a sleep coach—a gadget set up to monitor and predict your current and future sleep plans.

Finally, after reading through this year’s just-released 2010 Sleep in America poll, which reveals significant differences in the sleep habits and attitudes of Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Whites, I pondered the unique possibilities surrounding World Sleep Day slated for March 19th, 2010, a moment, perhaps, where all of us can come together as one.

As poets and songwriters have articulated over the years, we often don’t appreciate things until they’re gone. For me, sleep is like that, and as I sat at the computer, sipping my tea, my research complete, I realized how much I missed being asleep.

Sleep is something whose characteristics have changed for me over the years, and the older I get the more I appreciate it. 

When I was drinking, sleep was not really sleep but more just like passing out, something akin to crawling under a heavy rug and laying there for a couple of hours. In early sobriety, though, while making up for lost time, sleep took a regenerative turn, providing the kind of physical and emotional down-time that was crucial to recovery.

Eventually, kids came along and my sleeping patterns took yet another turn—one for the worse, if you ask me. Where once I had been able to sleep until noon on a Saturday or Sunday morning, those hours were sandblasted down to the point where even now when the kids are fully grown and sleeping, as my teenage daughter does, considerable hours themselves, I still find myself unable to sleep late on weekends.

Of necessity, however, I’ve come to appreciate other more diverse forms of sleep, such as the catnap, the meditation zone-out, the dozing-on-the-couch-with-the-TV-still-on slump, and the ever popular, “I’m just going to lie down for a minute” charade.

It took me a while as my morning cup of tea began to work, but I finally realized that Sleep Awareness Week was ultimately leading to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, starting on Sunday, March 14th—always a bit of a mixed blessing, as it indicates the inevitable arrival of spring, but takes, as its premium, an extra hour of sleep.

As one who has lost innumerable waking hours to alcoholic blackouts—hours simply vanished from the face of the earth—I figure the hour lost in daylight savings is a small price to pay for warmer weather. 

And so, with the car alarm finally silenced and National Sleep Awareness Week auspiciously launched, I’ve inched a little closer to the living room couch and have started considering the knotty logistics of a noon-time nap.