Asleep on a Sunbeam

October 26, 2023

Sometimes, I fall asleep in the middle of the day. I won’t reveal how frequently this occurs, but it’s happened enough over the course of my lifetime to be thematically significant.

When I fall asleep during the middle of the day, it is usually for somewhere between two and thirty minutes. Many marvel at the two-minute nap, and wonder how it is possible. I will reveal to you the secret: you wake up, and realize you have been asleep for two minutes.

Usually, it takes me some time to realize that I have been asleep. I awake mid-thought, and it feels for a few moments that I have not been sleeping at all, but merely thinking very deeply. The only trouble is that I can’t remember even slightly what I was thinking about. It’s a complete blank. All I remember is that I was thinking deeply on some topic or problem, and often, that I was just on the verge of figuring it all out.

This sort of ungraspable epiphanous realization is a hallmark of dreams: that spark of euphoria that envelopes you as you hit upon some amazing idea. For me, this spark usually involves a sort of meta-understanding that what I am experiencing or viewing in my dream would be a great idea for a novel. I feel the need to share this brand new something with the world. When I wake up, I find the idea either so nonsensical as to not even fit into words, or so stupid as to not be worth the words it fits into.

What’s so striking about waking up from this kind of nap is the feeling that, for that time, your mind didn’t belong to you. It’s like someone borrowed it for a while in order to work out a problem, and then gave it back. You have no memory of the time that has passed, but that lack of memory isn’t a non-existence but an absence. That time did pass; that moment did happen — it’s just that I wasn’t there for it. I thought I was, and then I wasn’t.

To many, the idea of falling asleep during the day is downright scandalous. The night is the time for sleep, and the day is the time to be awake. You may as well start walking on the ceiling. To sleep in the day is a dereliction of duty — there is the sun right outside shining for you, and you’re going to close your eyes to it?

But a nap can be a beautiful thing. Watch a cat curl up before the window, furrow its brow languidly, blink once, blink twice, and then drift to sleep. Observe a grandfather or an uncle in front of the television, head against the back of his armchair, arms flat on the armrests, looking as if he’s been tranquilized. Recall those precious moments of comfort, snug beneath a blanket on a winter’s day, when the world seemed to grow fuzzier and fuzzier with each passing moment.

In high school, I had an online friend from Denmark who told me he slept every day immediately on returning home from school, from 3:30pm to 11:30pm. For him, school was the final part of his day, and when he returned home exhausted, he simply went to bed. (This explains why we were able to converse so regularly despite living in such disparate timezones.) This was a man whose socialization primarily took the form of online messaging, and who clearly had no extracurricular responsibilities.

But I could understand this man, and see a certain beauty in his lifestyle. Because for a teenager, the night is their freedom. Whether it’s wandering the dark suburban streets on the way home from a party, or simply sitting awake in your bedroom watching anime and eating toast, such nocturnal activities are the lifeblood of the teenage spirit. At home and at school, one is always under the watchful eye of some authority figure or another, to the point where sunlight itself starts to feel like a means of surveillance. But when the sun goes down and the lights go off, and normal adults with normal jobs go to sleep, one is finally free to do what one wants with no need for explanation or inhibition. Why waste such a glorious time with sleep? Why not watch a Starcraft tournament broadcasting live from South Korea? Why not read the entire Wikipedia page for the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Why not [insert normal social activities of high-schoolers here]?

Are naps only for animals, the elderly, children, and teenagers? Can this truly be the case? As I mentioned above, I’ve napped often enough that I wouldn’t consider myself a novice in the art, but rarely without a sense of guilt for allowing things to reach this point. When I have exhausted myself through exercise or activity, I find napping impossible; when it feels necessary to my very survival, the sleep does not come. I nap most often because it is a damp, dreary November in my soul, and I can’t think of anything else to do. My naps are depressing affairs, brought about by misfortune and melancholy. They are not the naps of a cat, an old man, a child, or a restless teen. They are the sad solitary sleeps of a stay-at-home twenty-something.

My profound respect for naps in the abstract, coupled with my profound ambivalence toward their occurrence in my own life, leaves me in a state of profound muddlement. I find that I can say with surety only this:

Naps are a curious thing!