An Evolution of Sleep or The Art of Napping

I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping. By some estimates, nearly half my life. Sleep is a good thing, I’ve decided, in whatever size or increment it comes.

My relationship to sleep has evolved over the years, and will continue evolving for as long as I keep doing it, which, I suspect, will be the rest of my life.

I don’t know what my sleep patterns were as a baby, but I suspect I was more colicky than calm, though I have no proof on either front. I do know I was an uneasy sleeper in my youth and adolescence, the kind of kid who lay in bed at night thinking about monsters behind the door and masked commandos lowering themselves down from the roof and climbing into my bedroom window.

I started doing drugs and drinking at a fairly early age and this seemed to help, that is, unless I got hold of some speed, by chance, or perhaps a little LSD. These substances did not create much likelihood for sleep, except a day or two later when I would totally crash and sleep for 18 hours straight.

Initially, alcohol seemed to provide the proper methodology for sleep, but over the span of time I found myself drifting into insomnia.

Ultimately, the only thing that straightened out my sleep was sobriety. But it took a while. I remember hearing people talk in recovery meetings about their inability to sleep and experiencing it myself.

While there was often a sense of commiseration and an understanding of how disruptive the insomnia could be there was also a hard-edged recognition that it was something that simply had to be outrun, like an angry but overweight dog. “Nobody ever died from lack of sleep” was an answer I often heard in response to complaints about insomnia and, while factually not exactly true, it did capture the essence of one of AA’s informal slogans, “This too shall pass...”

One of the effects of the insomnia that I suffered through in the early stages of my recovery was that I would completely collapse as soon as I got home from work each day, telling myself that I was just going to rest for a moment before getting something to eat and going to a meeting that evening.

Almost immediately, I would plunge into a deep sleep, woken only by horrifyingly realistic dreams in which I was guzzling a bottle of Jack Daniels or had just discovered that I wasn’t really sober 15 days or 55 days as I thought and had been drinking all along.

Waking from these dreams was frightening at first, then slowly gratifying as I realized it was only a dream and that I had in fact been sober the whole time and that it was, indeed, time for the meeting.

It wasn’t long after my first few months of sobriety that my sleeping patterns morphed quite dramatically in the opposite direction and I found myself logging in 12 to 14 hours a night. And that didn’t seem to be enough. It was as if my body was determined to make up for all the years of deficit and I entered what I call my two-alarm phase, one in which it was necessary to have two alarm clocks, set for different times in different parts of the apartment that would actually require me to get out of bed to turn them off. 

Having children was the next big influence on my sleep, smashing the luxuriant pattern I had fallen into and moving me into what I call wakeful sleep, the kind of sleep where one eye remains open. 

Over the years, I’ve gone through numerous phases, from inappropriate sleep, where I find myself unable to stay awake at work, say, or on the subway, to fitful sleep, where I wake every few hours, it seems, chewing over some emotional issue left unresolved from the days or weeks before, to disturbed sleep, where I am woken by outside influences like midnight revelers streaming out of the bar across the street from my apartment or perhaps a fire engine barreling down Broadway, to labored sleep, where I wake in the morning feeling more tired than I was when I went to bed.

All these evolutions have led me, inexorably, it seems, toward the art of napping, and as I get older, I have become more creative about filling in the missing hours.

There is the seasonal nap, buried in blankets on a winter afternoon, or in front of the TV on a warm summer evening during a slow-moving baseball game, waking hopefully somewhere in the eighth or ninth inning as Mariano enters to close out another victory. There is also the proverbial cat nap, which can occur on virtually any piece of furniture at any time of the night or day.

In many ways, I am a much better person when I am asleep, a fact my wife has made note of, expressing as she did once in a couples therapy session we were having during a difficult time in our marriage. “I really love Ames when he’s asleep,” she said.

She went on to explain that she meant that when she looked over at me as we lay together in bed she realized how much she really loved me. I, nevertheless, took umbrage, and responded dryly, “Yeah, the problems only happen when I’m awake.”

In the end, when it comes to sleeping and napping, I have discovered that these hours of suspended sensory and motor activity are ultimately best served by trying to take care of things while I’m actually up and about. The more I address my fears, it seems, and face the many challenges that present themselves during each day’s march, the more inclined I am, as it says in AA’s Tenth Step (the one that suggests regularly taking personal inventory and promptly admitting it when we are wrong), to “truly thank God for the blessings we have received and sleep in good conscience." 

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