Now listen to me! I woke up last night at 2 in the morning, and couldn't get back to sleep, so I'm tired enough to know what I'm talking about! ...Just listen to me a little bit, my dear insomniac, and I'll solve all your problems. Make sure the surface where your cheek will fall is soft.

Waking up and not being able to slip back into the soft trench of nocturnal ordinariness is one thing -- if you can't help it, staying awake is not so awful, and you don't feel so wrecked the next day (though you start to prove why they say one needs "beauty sleep"). And there are all kinds of reasons why you might want to keep vigil -- for one thing, like fasting, it's a way to try to see god.

The wakefulness you must try to avoid is the dull-headed grindstoning over some project you think you must finish now. Your work will be labored and ungifted, and your exhaustion the next day will make you doze off in class, forget a promise, walk with your head down like a turtle so you miss every beautiful thing in the sky.

It's horribly unfair, but here's how we are made: we need sleep in order to remember. Even if you are having the most amazing experiences of your life -- learning the things you have always craved, spending time with the dearest and most entertaining people, and finding the most exquisite pleasures -- if you do not lock those things into your memory during sleep, they will survive only as grey ghosts, and you'll have double-spent this part of your life on a bad bargain. Who cares, in 50 years, whether you finished that paper? Go to bed now.

Of course, in 50 years you'll probably be old enough that you won't require as much sleep anyway, which may suggest that as we age we get better at remembering things and so don't have to re-learn so much. At least, I keep hoping.

Go to the next one, Letting Go: The Cutting Boar.

Return to the previous one, Lecture to Overly Gifted Students.

Back to contents of Micro-Essays site.