I'll sleep when I'm dead... or maybe on the bus
Considering how easy it is to fall asleep in the wrong situations -- lectures, night buses, performing emergency tracheotomies -- you'd think getting a decent night's kip be simple
You'd think, with over 25 years -- yeah, yeah, and the rest -- of doing something every day, that I'd have figured out how to do it. Yet I still find myself regularly disturbed, drenched with sweat and unable to fathom this simplest of biological imperatives. I'm talking, of course, about sleeping.
Considering how much practice we get at it, and how easy it is to fall asleep in the wrong situations -- lectures, night buses, performing emergency tracheotomies -- you'd think that getting a decent night's kip would simply be a matter of lying down and closing your eyes. But no.
I've tried everything: counting sheep, tensing every muscle and relaxing them one by one, reading before bed. Even reading failed, but that's probably because I'm reading Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, which is like being beaten up by the Internet and has the same relaxation properties as being set on fire.
The fact is, sleeping is boring. I'd much rather be on Facebook, or scanning my feeds to see what new USB sticks have hit the market, or watching the trailers for Watchmen and Bitch Slap, or snarking around in the CNET.co.uk forums, or blogging about any of the above. None of this lying still, in a darkened room, doing nothing except dreaming (although I once dreamt I was in a slapstick 80s action comedy with Martin Short about a couple of wacky bank robbers. Hilarity, let me tell you, ensued).
It's possible that having more gadgets charging than a National Grid substation two feet from my bed isn't great for my circadian rhythms. Or maybe I just need to go to bed earlier...