Opinions vary on how much sleep you need, and how much is too much or too little. Different people need different amounts and we all have very different requirements. Sleep can be a blissful regenerative experience and so its lack can be frustrating and even traumatic – both during the hours when you try, in vain, to sleep and during the following day when you have to not only deal with the challenges of the day, but have to deal with them in a foggy and slightly trippy frame of mind due to the lack of sleep the previous night.
I am very particular about my sleep and all the factors that surround it. I can’t sleep if I'm to hot or too cold. I can’t wear anything when I'm sleeping because i move about too much and on more than one occasion have woken up apparently trying to asphyxiate myself with my bedclothes. If the surface is too soft, or too hard, i can’t sleep. If there is noise outside the normal ambient white noise of a northern suburb, i can’t sleep (people rolling out of pubs drunk rarely disturb me as that’s par for the course). If my pillow is too high or too low, i can’t sleep. I take my own pillows pretty much everywhere with me because they’re at the right height and one of them is memory foam and it takes me a good 3 or 4 nights to get used to a new pillow arrangement that it generally works out easier all round just to bring my own. Getting to sleep, when all the right conditions are met, is a sublime experience. Failing to sleep due to one of the criteria falling short, can be a stressful experience, often triggering a catch-22 cycle of thoughts as i get more and more frustrated with my inability to perform the most basic and fundamental function of being human. For this reason i like to go to bed late, thoroughly exhausted, on crisp, clean sheets with my memory foam pillow, where i read until i find myself reading the same line 5 times through the drowse, or sometimes until i wake up with the book on my face.
Once I’m out though, there’s no waking me up. I would sleep until doomsday if i was left to it, so i have to have quite a complex and logical wake up system. I work shifts, which can be anything from an 8-4 to a 12-8, so week-to-week my sleeping patterns can be quite different. As you probably noticed already, I’m quite particular about things being changed, so i have conditioned myself to an easy to understand regime. I have one alarm for each shit pattern, and another for days off. Each has a different song assigned to it, so that when i wake up half dazed and befuddled, i can tell, from what song is playing, what shift i am on. Each alarm is set to snooze after 7 minutes (except days off when i have a ten minute snooze (if i have an alarm (and yes, i did just double bracket – three including this one))). I get up when it goes off for the third time, or before – if by some miracle i am awake enough.
This all probably seems terribly OCD, but if it is, it’s an OCD brought about by too many sleepless nights leading to the point where the only way to possibly *get* any sleep is to devise a system. The system has built up over many years and gradually becomes more complex and elaborate, as though sleep is an adversary, ever trying to evade capture, so i have to constantly update and refine my strategies to track him down. I suspect that by the time i reach old age, I will need three mattresses (one memory foam), a real-time temperature adjuster, a pile of cushions and pillows, a specially blended mix of exactly the right proportions of oxygen and nitrogen, and several lines of valium, just to get vaguely drowsy.
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