Saturday, April 23, 2005
ZZZzzz...
Screw this, I'll just write whatever comes to my mind... Read at your own risk.Sleep.
I need sleep. Lots of it.
For some reason, I never seem to get enough sleep. When I was in secondary school, I used to blame the classroom heat and humidity for being sleep-inducing. My mom blamed my late nights instead. Whatever. And then I started going to college, where I believed, naively, that the air-conditioned atmosphere would be more conducive for giving the teacher my undivided attention.
What actually happened was that it became a whole lot more enticing to sleep in class, comfort and all. Meh.
I have been adviced countless times to adjust my sleeping habits (of which the main contributors were, of course, my parents) and quit being nocturnal. Unfortunately, it didn't work, due to two prevailing factors; most of the time sleeping early failed to prevent me from dozing off at school, and I am at my most productive at night, so it feels like a waste to hit the sheets sometimes. Thus, the sleeping predicament persists.
It is only this year that I finally concluded that sleeping is not a problem; it is a pleasure. In fact, I have never enjoyed sleeping this much in my entire life (yeah, sounds like real fun, doesn't it?). Sometimes, during the weekend, when I have no homework left to do (which occurs very rarely, but I don't really care too much about homework anyway) I would just dump myself on the (soft, cozy, cushy) hostel mattress, which is ironically more comfortable than the one I have back at home. Then I proceed to escape from reality, and literally, into dreamworld.
The dreamworld is an unusually accomodating place; most of the time you have no idea that you are sleeping, and every memory you have of reality will reassemble themselves to make your dream believeable, no matter how far-fetched it would be had it been real life. If you're lucky, you get to dream about things that you may never have a chance to do in reality, from being together with the one girl that got away, to flying like a character out of a cliched Japanese manga. Another plus is that you will forget all the burdens you had in reality due to the 'memory reassambling effect'; for that short period of time you get to forget all your worries. It is probably the best form of escapism ever; it actually feels like you are doing the things you have always wanted to do, instead of fantasising and imagining all the time. One flaw in this method, of course, is the fact that you cannot really 'choose' your dreams when you fall asleep. You would just have to sort of gamble. But considering that the average person sleeps several hours everyday, the odds of are highly stacked in your favour. Naps of several minutes or even seconds may produce highly satisfying dreams (I've had a few during lectures).
And since we cannot choose what to dream, people are bound to experience nightmares. To those who do; you have my pity. Remember what I just said, about how "I've never enjoyed sleeping this much in my entire life"? That is because I am now suddenly able to wake myself up from sleep when things get ugly. For reasons that escape my explanation, I can sort of 'feel' it (usually when I hear a shrill, ringing sound in my ears) when a dream starts turning into a nightmare. Then I realise that I am dreaming, at which point (was that gramatically correct?) I could force myself awake by attempting to move my limbs. What's more freaky is that sometimes my eyes are open (yeah, dreaming with open eyes) when all these is happening, which adds an exceedingly high degree of eeriness to the situation. But it works, and I have not had a complete, nail-biting, teeth-grinding, pulse-quickening nightmare for quite some time already. Hence the remark that sleeping has become (at least for now) more enjoyable experience for me .
These days, it is not lack of sleep that makes me want to nod off, but rather, the craving for sleep. In fact, it just moved up a few notches in my list of favourite things to do. Unfortunately, sleep-craving does not answer why I still fall asleep in lectures and sometimes even during tutorials. Must be due to the teachers being too boring to warrant my undivided attention. Either that, or sleep-deprivation. Or self-denial.
So, if you would kindly accept my suggestion on what to do the next time you are bored out of your skull; sleep. It really takes your mind off things and solves a lot of problems.
We all need sleep. Lots of it.
