8 hours of slumber
Technically speaking, night is nothing but earth’s shadow falling on us. And the rest of us struggling to catch some forty winks. Day after day. Time after time. I know this for sure because since my college days, I haven’t slept well. People around me defy the laws of alarm while I continue to wake up like the sun every morning. Even when I don’t go to bed on time. Perhaps what doesn’t kill you doesn’t let you fall asleep either. If there was any justice in nature, the ideal scenario would be completely different: all humans getting at least 8 hours of rest.
World peace isn’t happening until we oblige the above criteria.
So, the question in front of us is, what can explain this sleeplessness? Who is responsible? Or more importantly, does anybody have to be responsible at all? For instance, if you break up with your beloved and are having sleepless nights, are you responsible for your sleeplessness or is it your ex? How does it work? When you pop in a pill of logic, the blame-game turns embarrassingly weak. You are worried because you don’t sleep or you don’t sleep because you are worried?
On the other end of the spectrum, I once read that the former Chelsea footballer Michael Essien slept for a daily average of 14 hours. That was (is?) his lifestyle. He couldn’t function properly if he didn’t complete his cycle. I don’t know how the likes of me are going through the day with less than half of his bedtime. Yes, of course, history is crowded by high-achieving individuals like Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, APJ Kalam, Menachem Begin and Shah Rukh Khan with less than 5 hours of sleep. But at least this category has something to show for its sleepless deprivation.
Lesser mortals, like us, have hardly anything but dark circles to display.
Well, trying to sleep is like training a dragon to fly.
You simply can’t.
Sometimes.
After years of reading, thinking and observing behaviour, I can safely conclude that the greatest disparity in the world is not between the haves and have-nots. It’s between those who sleep well and those who don’t. Left to a final choice, humans are programmed by evolution to choose rest over food. In fact, during our early hunting-gathering days, the structure of a society revolved around keeping guard at nighttime when people caught some shuteye. For example, two men kept their eyes open so that dozens of eyes can close theirs.
Sleepiness is a sign of safety as well as a call for danger. Once you pass out, your senses are pretty much useless. You may not feel somebody touching you — not even painful ones apropos mosquitoes — while your eardrums are offline and so are your olfactory workers. At a cosmic scale, sleep is how the universe meditates through you. Think about it. You have 24 hours in a day and ideally, you are supposed to be temporarily dead for one-third of this timeframe. That’s a LOT of time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the sleep-o-meter of a koala (22 hours) or an armadillo (18 hours) or a cat (14 hours) or a dog (12 hours) but then, we are the ones who deal with the concept of alternate reality. They don’t.
Whenever I disturb somebody’s sleep, I feel like a cardinal sin has been committed. For reasons best left to my conscience, I can’t wake up somebody without feeling guilty. Which is why I’ll never understand those who murder their victims during their most blissful state. Isn’t that bad manners? Can’t they wake them up first? Just wondering.
One of the many benefits of resting well is you dream well. You watch longer dreams instead of those badly edited 10-min videos where you are chasing a thief in one scene and getting mauled by a tiger in another. I may not enjoy quality sleep but fortunately, I subscribe to the finest dreams. The funny part being I am acutely aware of my insomnia even while I am dreaming. In some of my dreams, I am a person who is looking for an insomnia to fall asleep with. Complicated relationship goals. In fact, in my dreams, I’d be telling somebody that I haven’t rested in ages and the somebody in question would be like — “Oh, that’s so sad. I hope you sleep so well that you wake up as a different person altogether.”
Not sure whether the secret to fulfillment is hidden under our eyelids but in all fairness, getting uninterrupted sleep must be the ultimate lottery. You wake up energized and ready to conquer the world. It’s a gorgeous feeling. According to my understanding, the worst thing that you can do to yourself at this point of time is worry about its repetition. What if I am not able to sleep like this again anytime soon? Selfish and foolish thoughts. The funda is quite simple: go to sleep if it doesn’t come to you.
There could be many factors contributing to your unspiritual awakening. Heavy dinner. Lack of exercise. Work stress. Life troubles. Social media. Etc. It’s your duty to yourself that you identify that root cause and work on it. The key is to stay positive about your well-being — both mental and physical — and work on yourself.
Lastly, we chase a lot of material goals and it’s understandable why we follow this modern rhythm. Less is not more and insecurity is a way of life. We throw fancy phrases like ‘chase your dreams’ and ‘seize the day’ when we know already that the greatest irony about ‘chasing your dreams’ is catching up on lost sleep. And ‘seize the night’ is what truly matters at the end of the day.
