Sleep, The Great Healer

I was fortunate enough to spend most of my life needing around 5 hours sleep a night.  It meant that I could go to bed late and get up early and maximise my day.  If one takes the years from, say 16 to 56 ie 40 years and adds up all those extra hours - say 3 per night over the average 8 hours/night sleep most people seem to require - I have possibly gained somewhere in the region of 5 years extra waking time.  That's quite a thought.

Of course there is a school of thought that says having less sleep shortens your life.  If that is true then, as Billy Connolly has pointed out,  it will be knocked off the end where I'm least likely to be able to use it to the full.  Did I use those 5 years to the full?  We will never know.

This last week when I was less than on top of the world with a bout (thanks Carol in Cairns) of bronchitis I slept and I slept.  I cannot recall when I last had so much sleep.  Even last night now that the bout is, hopefully, coming to an end I slept for 9 hours.

So tonight now that we are in Dannevirke for the Veterans Croquet Tournament I am anticipating a really good night's sleep too.  It's 9.30pm and two of the girls (a rather loose term) who are proper Kiwis have gone off to bed.  Self-respecting Kiwis go to bed early and get up early.  That's why coffee bars are open at 0630 and close at 1530 (as a generalisation) and why you never ring a Kiwi after 9pm. 

Thankful Thursday

At 0900 the reminder on my iPhone told me it was Thankful Thursday.  Again?  I really must find a way of slowing time down.  So much to do and so little time in which to do it.  How many times have I said that?

I spent quite a lot of time today thinking about what to post because I have so much for which to be thankful.  Indeed the list is endless.

Today, however, I have decided to be thankful for sleep.  Whilst I was staying at a friend's in Tauranga over the last weekend I slept the sleep of the just or the dead or whichever saying you use.   I slept well.  I slept without nightmares.  I always have when I have stayed there.  Many I know do not sleep well in a strange bed but I think that sometimes one can have an affinity with a house and I have one with that house.

All my life I have been blessed with the ability to sleep soundly and most of my life I never needed much sleep - 5 hours was my usual.  As we get older convention has it that we need less sleep.  I sleep longer than I used to do.  I rarely go to bed before midnight but I am asleep within minutes and I often sleep for 6, and sometimes 7, unbroken hours.  I very rarely wake in the night (the occasional natural comfort break excepted and then I'm usually fast asleep within a minute of replacing my head on the pillow).   I'll skip talking about the nightmares.

So today I am thankful for the gift of sleep: long, deep, unbroken sleep.  I wish it for you too.

A Surfeit of Sleep?

It's 0518 and instead of getting up as I might occasionally do at this hour, I am going to turn off the light and see if I can get some sleep.   It is rare for me not to be asleep withing minutes (or even seconds) of putting my head on the pillow and to sleep solidly until I wake in the morning ready to meet the next day.  I usually go to bed very late.  Last night I was reading in bed (a relatively new thing in my life) and put the light out at midnight.  I'd had the computer backing up a clone since the early evening and it was due to finish around 0130.  I knew it would switch itself off so went to sleep without thinking about it - consciously.  At 0152 I woke:  wide awake.  I got up and checked the computer and it hadn't switched off so I did that and came back to bed.  I don't know how much music I've listened too as I floated in a world somewhere between sleep and wake, dream and reality for two hours before I eventually got up at 0430 and made myself a green tea with lots of fresh ginger grated into it.  I know that during those several seemingly interminable hours I spent a lot of time wondering whether I could afford to retire from work and why some people I was talking to couldn't hear me yet some could.  The mind is a very strange place - well mine is anyway!

As I wrote this I thought about a post I wrote a few years ago (found it thanks to Mark's Postvorta: Can You Sleep at Night?) relating the story of a Ghanain lady who said to a friend of mine "You white people you don't sleep at night.  You white people worry.  You have too many things.  I have nothing.  I don't worry.  I sleep at night."  I don't have anything to worry about (that I know of) so I'm looking for another cause.  I think it's because I've had too much sleep recently!  A surfeit of sleep.