Sleep. I never seem to get enough of it. I feel as if I\u2019ve spent much of my adulthood sleep deprived. I remember during my senior year of high school the country went on year-round daylight savings time. For me, all this meant was that I was getting up and riding to school on the school bus before the sun came up. It was bad enough that I had to meet my bus about 6:00 AM; now it was in the dark.<\/p>\n
\tAs an undergraduate in college, I had early morning classes and often stayed up too late studying, though only twice did I pull an all-nighter where I went a full twenty-four hours without sleeping. The two summers I worked on a kibbutz in Israel, I was up every day before 4:00 AM and on the days I had to work with chickens, by 2:00 AM. Even with the mid-day nap time\u2014when between two and four every day the entire nation of Israel crawls into bed to sleep (and even the stores and buses shut down)\u2014I never seemed to feel rested.<\/p>\n
\tIn graduate school at UCLA I was lucky to see an average of four hours of sleep every night, what with working full time and going to school full time and commuting two hours and more every day on the LA freeways. Then there were the times I had to pull extra shifts at work, including the one nightmarish Christmas when I was at work a full twenty-four hours. At least I got paid triple time for some of that.<\/p>\n
\tAs a parent there have been those times when I was up with my children for half the night\u2014most memorably when my firstborn daughter became ill her first Christmas Eve. We spent most of the night with her as she battled a high fever.<\/p>\n
\tEven now, with two daughters in college and one a senior in high school, I feel as if I never get enough sleep. I arise too early and stay up too late. Multiple nights each week it seems that I find myself awakening more than once in the middle of the night, sometimes because of a bad dream, other times for reasons that I can\u2019t figure out. Even on Saturdays, when I have hopes of sleeping in until I just naturally awaken, I find myself crawling out of bed due to feelings of guilt\u2014\u201clook at the time, it\u2019s nearly nine, what are you going to do, waste your whole day in bed?\u201d Or my wife, or one of my children, suddenly needs me to catch a bug (I refuse their demands to \u201ckill it!\u201d: instead I catch it and put it outside). Or \u201cdaddy, can you feed me?\u201d Or \u201cI need the ice chest, can you get it out of the garage?\u201d Or \u201cI can\u2019t find my notebook, can you find it for me?\u201d Or some such thing.<\/p>\n
\tIt is not, of course, anyone else\u2019s fault that I don\u2019t get enough sleep, or that I don\u2019t get what I perceive to be as enough sleep. I could go to bed earlier, and I could take naps during the day. After all, I\u2019m an author, I work from home, and none of my editors can see what I\u2019m doing. So long as I meet my deadlines, they don\u2019t care if I\u2019m sleeping or partying all day long. Produce! If I can do that, nothing else matters.<\/p>\n
\tRecently I spent time with my parents and I asked them how they are sleeping. They told me they sleep well, very soundly, and have no trouble with it at all. My sister told me the same thing. It\u2019s generally a family trait that we sleep soundly and uninterruptedly.<\/p>\n
\tI have memories of that sort of sleep. <\/p>\n
\tIn fact, it seems as if it has always been just memories. Even my wife has commented that I don\u2019t seem to sleep as well as I used to. And I can\u2019t help but agree. On our two week long honeymoon at Lake Tahoe, so many years ago, I spent the first week mostly asleep. This was my first break, my first vacation, after four years of undergraduate study and three years as a graduate student at UCLA\u2014three years of full time work and full time school with never more than an average of four hours sleep a night. So on my honeymoon, my body attempted to overcome those three years of horrible sleep deprivation. Never since, have I consistently gone with so little sleep. In fact, I currently average at least seven hours per night. But for some reason, it still never seems to be enough.<\/p>\n
\tI wonder if, after all these years, I still just have not recovered from my years at UCLA? Or maybe, when my children are done with school, and they are living their lives without me, maybe then I\u2019ll finally be able to sleep? <\/p>\n
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