Sleep apathy

I usually stay up late. It’s just kind of my nature. One reason for this is I tend to get a motivation groove late at night, whether doing work related stuff or things around the house.
Everyone else goes to bed, the house gets quiet, and I am suddenly in the zone, able to go until the wee hours of the morning.
It’s amazing how much work you can get done when you don’t have to stop and say, “DO NOT throw earthworms at your sister!!!”
Normally, I go to bed around 1 a.m., and I get up around 6:30 in the morning. I have an alarm set, but I generally do not need to use that, because far more effective than an alarm clock is a 4-year-old nose touching your nose saying, “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. I’m hungry. Make some waffles. Daddy.” He occasionally pokes me just to make sure I am paying attention.
But every so often, I decide I need to catch up on my sleep. I used to do this on weekends courtesy of a nap. Years ago, naps were a daily staple. Over the years, as kids came along and my work schedule changed, naps became relegated to weekends.
Of course, my weekends now tend to get a little hectic on occasion, too, so oftentimes my naps get pushed to the side. (Apparently, it is bad form to curl up for a nap in the middle of a walk through the zoo.)
And since I usually get home during the week pretty close to the kids’ bedtime, I can’t in good conscience walk in and say, “Hey, kids, good to see you. Now, quiet time while Daddy gets a little shuteye.”
So that means that the only way I can catch up on my sleep is to do what used to be the unthinkable – go to bed early. Seems like a simple enough concept.
Every week or two, I just decide I will forego work or house projects and hop on under the covers around 9:30 or 10. Maybe watch some TV. Maybe flip through a magazine.
This would be a great plan if the cosmic forces would ever allow me to actually fall asleep and stay asleep until morning.
There are three kinds of forces that get a heckuva chuckle out of making sure that the nights I try to go sleep early are the longest nights of my life: (1) Natural forces (2) supernatural forces and (3) brutal physical forces.
The natural forces usually come in the form of dogs, although the cat on occasion mixes it up. (Dachshund vs. evil cat underneath a bed makes for good times.) Sometimes it’s as simple as a bark every 10-15 seconds.
After about a minute of this, I get up, go downstairs, and walk the dogs outside. They agree to walk outside, while I stand in my kitchen and invariably glance over at, say, a pile of papers sitting on a desk.
Hey, I suppose I could just straighten this one pile of papers up, and you know, sort out the mail, see if there is anything that can be trashed, that sort of thing.
Before I know it, it’s two hours later, the fridge is spotless, the books on the shelf are arranged by height and the kids toys are all in bags in the garage. (They are usually retrieved the next day, after my wife overrules my “They Haven’t Played With It In, Like, Hours!!!” standard.)
The supernatural forces are the most entertaining, because they usually involve waking my wife out of a dead sleep, having her sit up straight in bed in a panic and then wakes me up, using saying something in a half-delusional babble that, while it wakes me out of my early sleep, is good for a laugh.
We’ll both be sound asleep, and, say, the ice maker will cut on. My wife will hear it, sit up in bed, grab me and say, “Michael – listen. The moat’s overflowing.”
I’ll tell her we don’t have a moat.
She will start to come to and say, “I...uh...I know...But go downstairs and make sure the doors are locked.” I think the last part is just punishment.
The final force is the brutal physical force, and it occurred the other night. I was exhausted and decided I had to check out early.
I plopped down on the couch about 9:00 to watch some TV. I needed just to rest for a second, I thought.
By about 9:03, I was snoozing good.
My wife woke me up and suggested I go to sleep in an actual bad. I told her I was on my way, which was apparently not true, since at about 11, my couch nap ended and I headed upstairs.
The nap did not rest me up too much, which further told me that I really needed some sleep.
As I climbed under the covers, I only gave passing thought as to which force would wake me up.
I found out in the early morning hours, when I woke completely drenched in sweat. I mean head-to-toe. It was like I had just stepped out of the shower and into the bed. Very comfortable feeling. I was burning up, so I went and turned the ceiling fan on.
And can you guess what happened then. In about two minutes I was shivering cold.
This process went on for the better part of the night, back and forth, back and forth, each time ending with me trying to find a new section of the bed that I could occupy that was also not soaking wet.
By morning, my side of the bed was stripped off and I was huddling with a blanket that I found on the floor, and I think just may have been a dog’s blanket.
By morning, the temperature fluctuations had subsided. I have no idea what was going on, and think it must just be a cruel joke to make sure I didn’t get sleep at night.
I suppose in a few days I will try another approach at getting a little extra shut-eye catch up. Maybe I’ll go the zoo. They might have changed their rules.