Back when I was young and limber and could stay up late enough to outlast all the stores in town, I slept like a dinosaur. Long, uninterrupted nights and mornings of luxurious slumber.
I had extravagant dreams in which I was occasionally a hero and occasionally a clueless teenager who forgot to wear clothes.
The difference between then and now—in addition to the young and limber part—is that now what I dream about is sleeping long enough to actually have a dream. In those fantasies I awaken clear-eyed and bouncy instead of bleary and lethargic, which is how I emerge most mornings.
I mention this because one of our feature stories in this issue focuses on sleep and dreams, both the area of research and the name of the popular course Professor William Dement is famous for. Dement has spent decades trying to tell the world that sleep is important. Well, my brain got that message. Unfortunately, my body is still trying to get with the program.
Sleep is mostly a concept for me these days. What I'm good at is dozing. I can doze on the couch, doze on the patio, doze on the beach, doze in an airplane, doze at a board meeting of an earnest nonprofit. What I can't do is string together a full night of actual sleeping.
Going to sleep isn't the issue: I crawl into bed around 11, and I'm usually out in a minute or two. The rest of the night is a series of wake-ups, punctuated by eye-opening peeks at the level of darkness outside to gauge how much longer I have to wait until "morning."
Some nights I wake all the way up, usually a few minutes on either side of 3 a.m.—strangely, the time deviates only slightly from night to night. I roll over, reposition the pillow, burrow into the blankets and enjoy the comfort of a designer mattress that is worth more than my car. Not that this does any good. For the next few minutes and sometimes hours I meander through sleep-inducing techniques ranging from imagining I'm in a tent in a howling windstorm (an operating fan nearby helps with the effect) to focusing on deep, shallow breaths that mimic the sound of an actual sleeping person. But the focused breathing gets me thinking about yoga, which makes me think about how sore my shoulder is, which reminds me that I need to make an appointment with my physical therapist. . . .
I am actually quite productive in the middle of the night. I lie there solving problems and composing sentences and imagining prospective trades for my fantasy baseball team. Every sort of thought wedges into my head during those restless hours, such as "Who was that actor who played the dwarf in Lord of the Rings?"
Dement and his legions of devotees over the years have contributed much to our understanding of sleep, both the science of it and the importance of it. What I'm waiting for is the perfect remedy for sleeplessness that doesn't involve pharmaceuticals. Maybe the answer is more kale or less chocolate or reading Finnegans Wake. I hear that's a real snooze.
Kevin Cool is the executive editor of Stanford.
