Thursday, August 22, 2013

Notes from a semi-sleepless night

Some 45 or 50 years ago, I decided that I wanted to be like Caligula.

I was watching the television production of a play about the crazed Roman emperor, and at one point Caligula said something about sleeping only three or four hours a night.

To my youthful mind, the idea of being able to function with so little sleep suggested such an intensity of life that I immediately wanted that. How much more productive could I be with an extra four hours a day?!

So far, not much.

I can't say that I regularly get by on no more than four hours of sleep. If I don't use an alarm, I usually awaken naturally after seven hours or so.

Then there are nights like tonight. I conked out around 9 or 9:30, woke up at 1:37, used the bathroom, crawled back in bed, and lay there with my mind racing for another hour.

When I first woke up, I thought about taking a bath, but decided against it because I didn't want to fall asleep in the tub. In the end, I decided that falling asleep in the tub would be better than lying awake in bed. So here I soak.

4:43 - I just spent more than an hour completing this post in Blogger. When I pressed "Publish," all that work disappeared, except for what you see above. GET IT TOGETHER, GOOGLE!

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