At Little Pumpkins Daycare in 1999, the most sought-after play-toy is the computer, a Windows 95 that sits in the front half of the playroom with two pre-loaded games: Freddi Fish 3, The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell, and Putt-Putt (the purple car) Travels Through Time. The first infant to claim the computer gets to play indefinitely, the only interruption being naptime. Joel, a cute but insular infant, never gets a turn on the computer; his parents live far away; he always arrives to daycare late; there’s always someone else at the monitor when he gets there, usually this brunette bitch. He dreams up wild scenarios in which he has his own computer, a portable one even, but this is impossible, will never happen. So, he devises a plan.
On a mild day in March, when the bearded caretaker commands his minions to lie down on the blue carpet in the rear half of the playroom, Joel snuggles up to his pillow and pretends (such is the genius of his plan) pretends to drop into instant sleep. The caretaker draws the curtain to divide the front from back half of the room and Joel lays with his eyes closed, conciousness still churning for upwards of ten long minutes. Then, the caretaker, oblivious to Joel’s fraudulent sleep, splits the curtains a fraction, and Joel splits his eyelids just the same. He surveys the scene through his lashes. Just a little longer, he decides, and then he’ll be the first to supposedly wake, and then he can claim the computer. He shuts his eyes once more, wriggles up to his pillow to feign a waking-up restlessness, and then he falls asleep.
In the days before music festivals being deadly viral clusterfucks, each year my family and a few family friends would attend Woodford Folk Festival, an hour’s drive northwest of Brisbane, on a longitude of 153°, and (in Celsius) just about as hot. For seven overlong summer days we endured the sweat-sucking heat, a heat that sapped our energy at three times the regular rate and refused to let us replenish our stores. Late nights, early sunrises, sweltering tents—those who drained themselves early failed to revitalise by new year's eve. It was a festival that required careful pacing to maximise attendee experience. It was a festival that required naps.
Woodford regular, Hugh Chan, had a faculty for efficient sleeping. He could nap in the shade of doughwood tree while kids of age 4–12 squealed and played The Game around him. He could nap on the 30° slope of the grassy Grande hill, a snooze and simultaneous slide. He could nap on dusty rugs, in ovens/tents, in camp chairs, picnic chairs, on dirt, on straw, on gravel. Several times I witnessed him sleep on the plywood flooring of the Concert Stage not three feet in front of the speakers. Hugh would dance with the energy of holding an electric fence, drop to the ground as if electrocuted and sleep for no more than twenty-five minutes before waking, fully revitalised, to continue throwing erratic shapes. All while I watched on, eyes progressively drooping, shoulders slowly slumping, legs turning to half-melted jelly from my afternoon insomnia. I wished, I wished I could nap as well as he.
For a long while I attributed Hugh’s capacity for napping to his seemingly enchanted straw hat, a pliable, breathable weave that fit snugly atop his head but also, when rotated, stuck to the front of his face such that he could lie supine, lean back in a chair, heck even rest near-vertically with his shoulder against a tree trunk, temp. fence, or other sturdy festival goer, stick the hat to the front of his face to diffuse incoming light (and apparently dampen sound) and nap, instantly, every time. But when I bought my own straw hat and attempted to nap in even the most idyllic soft grass, the soporific magic eluded me. Why could I not replenish my tank with such ease? Why did I have to sway and loll on the dancefloor, tired, while Hugh could all-out jive? I envied my friend and his hat. In sweaty delirium I’d look at the sweet-sleeping Hugh and wish he was restless like me.
A year of university has Joel unaccustomed to rising at a reasonable hour, so as he boards QF113 to Japan and sits in the middle seat of the left side of the plane, he remains drowsy, sluggish, dumb. A teaspoon of rheum clogs the corner of each eye. Yawns arrive on a forty-second schedule. The aeroplane air con is laced with an airborne sedative. The engines hum. In the window seat: his girlfriend, who in a stroke of fate is the same computer-stealing brunette bitch from before. And in the aisle seat to his right is a small, quiet-mouthed, hijab’d teen who, alone, rubs the pads of her fingers to her thumb and compulsively reads the safety card from the pocket of the seat in front. The plane is still attached to the gangway when Joel’s eyelids droop. They close and open in cycles, until his lids flatline, and shut with the permeance of Jesus’ tomb.
It’s risky to sleep on aeroplanes, risky because of the limited economy chair-space offered, risky because you rarely know the person you sit beside and thus in your restlessness might offend your neighbour by abruptly invading their space…
Joel dreams of being chased by a pitbull, of leaping from shingled apex to COLORBOND® roof, of flipping over barbed fences and crawling through underground tunnels, of tripping and rotating as the pitbull hurdles toward him with a gaping, lupine maw, and of throwing out his arm in self-defence right as the plane detaches from the gangway, and he wakes with his fist throttled an inch in front of the nervous teen beside. She breathes fast, and Joel apologises for the fragility of his sleep.
I’ve seen it gifted to my Woodfordian friend, so I know the capacity to nap perfectly exists. Call it naïveté or unwarranted hope, but I believe—I believe—this ability is attainable, believe through practice and experimentation, this power can be held by anybody.
But at what cost? How many cumulative hours, days, years will I lose to lying down in a semi-sunlit bedroom watching the shifting black of the backs of my eyelids and failing to sleep, failing to do anything at all? How many times do I have to exit an intended siesta still tired-eyed and groggy before I get it right? Because how many variants are there of the napping schedule? All of which I’ll have to try multiple times over to ensure I’m achieving a statistically optimal nap. I’ve read the correct duration is twenty-three minutes, but am unsure if this applies to recovery, relaxation or preventative styles of sleep. And all these productivity, self-help books endorse coffee intake prior to napping but fail to dig into what it would mean if the caffeine kicked in halfway through. And meditation helps with drifting off, but maybe not as much as reading. And at what temperature? What clothes do I wear? Do I use ersatz ambiance or rely on natural sounds? What time signature does my circadian cycle beat to? It’s all idiosyncratic; existing research may not apply. Do I need to recreate all these experiments specifically for me?
A break doesn’t need to be optimal to have effect. Given the likely state of a potential napper prior to napping—unfocused, uncoordinated, lazy—the product of an attempted nap can only be neutral or beneficial, right? If they fail to REM, they’re back to where they started, but their lives will improve if they succeed. So, if I’m going to get something positive out of every nap experiment (data or data and energy), short breaks will always be worthwhile, right? Except, there’s just one major risk:
The post-Christmas/pre-New Year period is a caesura from everyday life. It’s a block of groggy-headed warm in which to de-stress and recharge. It is, in essence, a break from repetition, a dodging of burnout, a nap. He’s got a blog post due, has it drafted and needs to type it up but finds his vitality lacking. He sits at his study, fingers on keys, and the screen in front periodically blurs; his eyes unfocus; his head tilts. He decides to nap.
He lies on a mattress that swaddles him; he sleeps. And in this period there're no obligations, no need to set an alarm, so the nap extends beyond a nap and he wakes more groggy than before and concludes this cloud will dissipate with a little more sleep. And he wakes again, groggy again, and sleeps once more, seeking energy. And he wakes again, groggy again &c., &c., &c.
This is the real risk of napping: the tendency to wake and re-sleep. Here, not only has a napper lost time, but has taken steps backwards in terms of energy. It’s easy, when I’m tired, to drop what I do, to rejuvenate through distraction, to break. And it’s easy to get stuck in this limbo, in this dream state. And the longer I spend here, the more I forget of everyday life, and what I must return to.
Sleeping is snakes and ladders. The course is long. The serpents abound. But the dice can be rigged. One day I’ll learn how to break properly.
In the winter of 2045, Joel shuts the bedroom blinds at 2:15 p.m. A rain shower shushes outside. He draws up the blanket, reads something mundane for precisely ten minutes, and then he sets an alarm. He rolls over and sleeps until his dreams sound real, and then he wakes with energy.
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