As the changeover date approached, radio and television were full of reminders and the promise that we could all enjoy an extra hour of sleep.
An extra hour of sleep: more than sufficient compensation for having to change all of the clocks in your house (and the batteries in your smoke detectors).
It is a compelling offer, no doubt.
I have spent most of my adult life in search of just a few more minutes of sleep. Every morning, as my world comes back into focus, I try to calculate what trade-offs I have to make for just a little longer in my nice warm bed.
I go through all of the stages of grief
at the start of every day before my feet ever hit the floor. Denial is immediate when the alarm goes off. I don't care who you are, as soon as you turn off that noise, the first thing you do is get visual confirmation that the clock went off at the time you set. Even though it went off at six-thirty every day this week, I will swear on a stack of TV Guides that I just turned out the light and it just can't be any later than one a.m.. Of course, the last thing I remember before going to sleep was the funny way that the cat was looking at me.
Could happen. I mean he's home all day with nothing better to do. He could have figured it out by now.
But no, a blurry-eyed visual confirms that it is six-thirty: time to get up.
The bed is warm, the room is still dark and the house cold. Surely another few minutes won't matter.
And then the alarm goes off again and I realize that, instead of permanently silencing this morning terrorist, I merely wounded it by stabbing its snooze bar.
(I just want to say for the record that there is nothing satisfying about a five minute snooze.)
Maybe it's just me, but alarms sound angrier the second time around. It's like when in the role of Jack Bauer, Keifer Sutherland is able to convey a measure of resentment toward the people who attack him and who he is then forced to kill. "Look what you made me do. I didn't want to wake you up, but you made me."
It does not bode well for the rest of the day when you start off being threatened by an inanimate object.
There is no bargaining with the clock, it must be silenced by any means necessary. (For those who think I might be overstating this conflict, I draw your attention to the Runaway Alarm Clock that is designed to sit on the floor and then when it goes off, it also takes off. It has wheels and can run under the bed, or even out of the room to simultaneously incur and avoid your wrath.)
The next stage is bargaining. I'm awake, but still reluctant to get out of bed. My mind begins trying to remember my schedule, how much time it takes to get to work. Next, I reflect on issues relating to personal hygiene. I had a shower yesterday, right? Can I get through all I have to do today with an extra coat of deodorant and a hat? My spouse describes her bargaining process as figuring out what she's going to wear and sometimes this process can take a long time.
There is an audible cue when you enter the depression stage. It could be a sigh, or a grunt, or a favorite epithet: whatever the noise, it is a sign of surrender. The battle of another night's rest has been lost. Once this point is reached it is not a question of if you are going to get up, but when.
The next and final stage--acceptance--comes pretty quickly. Another day will not be denied and so I pull myself to my feet and shuffle off to the bathroom.
But the mind deprived of sleep is like a daytrader on crank: it begins to plan on how quickly it can get back to bed and what compromises will need ot be made to make that happen. Do I really need that class to graduate? Will they miss me if I don't go to that meeting? I worked over last week, I should be able to take off early today.
So I lurch through my day trying to get everything done so that I can get back to bed, but when I finally do get to go home and can go to bed, I don't. I instead engage in a thousand different time wasters so that when I do go to bed I am so exhausted that I have these hallucinations about my cat.
We delude ourselves that sleep is something we can catch up on. Seven to eight hours per night is an average, isn't it? If I get three hours tonight and thirteen on Sunday then it will all balance out, right? We approach sleep like we approach planning for retirement: I will gladly sleep tomorrow for life lived today.
The sad truth of growing up is that while it seems like the days all run together, they are in fact closed sets. If you don't get enough sleep today then there is no making that up: sleep deferred is sleep lost and you know how cranky you can get.
Research documents the correlation between sleep and mood, something our mothers tried to teach us from the very beginning. Granted, nap time for toddlers is just as important, if not more so, for their sleep-deprived parents, but it always seemed like such an artificial interruption in the day.
Like so many lessons that parents try to pass along it, at the time, had no context. It was not until we have our own experience of sleep deprivation that we recognize the value of nappy time.
Other cultures have a much more practical relationship to sleep. Like my dog who insists on being outside just in case he might miss someone who had not had the opportunity to tell how beautiful he is, North Americans think we have to be awake all the time. We drug ourselves into being alert and then we drug ourselves to get some sleep. There are many countries that stop in the middle of the day for a national time out. It's the warmest part of the day, the world and its troubles will still be there in a couple of hours and, with a nap, we'll be better able to deal with them. Like the song says "only mad dogs and Englishmen
go out in the noon day sun."We teach ourselves that sleep is a luxury that we can't afford, that there is too much to do and not enough time. But, for a cultue, that prides itself on its capacity to innovate, our day and night sleep deprived society has deprived itself of an important fuel source to drive that capacity: dreams.
I was recently forced to take some time off to recover from surgery and though I railed against the house arrest and the inactivity, I was struck by the fact that I was having vivid, cinematic dreams. On one occaision, the dream was so vivid that it woke me up and I cannot recall the last time that happened.
Provided the luxury of being able to ignore the alarm clock and forced to pull back from the stress of work, my mind was freed to take me places in my dreams that I had never been. (That so many of those places and situations seeemed to result in my being chased by one malefactor or another is perhaps a subject for another time.)
My personal psychology to one side, the act of dreaming enables the dreamer's subconscious to make connections and create images that can inform their waking life. Logic and due diligence will take you a long way, but sometimes to complete a journey you need a touch of the poet.
I'm back at work now and my dreams have been replaced by long days and short nights. I have returned to a routine that allows me to process the task in front of me, but blinds me to a broader vision. I get up because I have to and then stay up until I can't. The net effect of this self-perpetuating cycle is a sense of numbness. It's hard to feel much of anything except the depressed acceptance at the start of another day and the ache of exhaustion when it's over.
But, on the bright side, as least I get an extra hour of sleep once a year...unless of course the cat has other plans.
--Graham Campbell
Associate Director
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