The alarm begins its discordant wake-up call. Snooze. I realize that I have a paper to finish. Snooze. It needs to be done before I go to class at noon. Snooze. I have already gotten eight hours of sleep. Snooze. 10 a.m. seems like a perfectly reasonable time to get out of bed. Snooze. If I don’t get up now I can’t grab breakfast before class. Snooze. Get up or you are going to be late again. Snooze. Shit. Yep, typical morning for a sleep junkie. I know. My addiction started at a young age. However, I never could have imagined what demons awaited me in college. Needless to say, my habit spun out of control, from five to seven to 10 hours a day. And then, quicker than you can say narcolepsy, I was sleeping every moment I could, to the detriment of Samuel Huntington, Econ class and human interaction.
I did everything I could to avoid the demon: I stayed away from my room, I dispensed with coffee and started taking caffeine intravenously, I piled some stuff on my bed in order to make a “quick” nap a more arduous task. But sleep seduced me, dripping from the voice of my political science teacher, lounging between shelves at the library, hidden behind the Mango syrup at the coffeehouse. It beckoned to me with irresistible “come hither” yawns and before I knew it, I had run home, moved the preventative pile from bed to floor and sunk into the warm, welcoming arms of my dealer, Mr. Sandman.
Admittedly the problem sounds ridiculous to just-get-uppers. “Just get up,” they tell me, the contempt clearly present behind each syllable. Oh yeah, sure, it seems simple, and yet I cannot recall one single morning in the history of my existence on this ball of molten rock when I have “just gotten up.” Oh, there have been mornings where I snooze for three hours, despite the fact that I set the alarm the night before for the time when my pre-sleep-drugged mind wanted to get up. During these mornings I wake up every 10 minutes for three hours, and each time create another fantastic?and completely rational?reason why I clearly was out of my mind when I set my alarm. There are mornings where others attest to my having woken up, turned my alarm clock off and gone back to sleep. Oh yes, mornings, afternoons and even evenings occur frequently when I close my eyes “for just a minute,” only to wake up two hours later convinced that I must have fallen into some sort of rip in the time-space continuum. There have even been mornings, God help me, when I have gotten out of bed, taken a shower, eaten, gotten dressed and then?you guessed it?gotten back into bed and fallen asleep again.
I hear you scoffing. I am tired, not deaf. I understand the non-addict’s inability to appreciate the seriousness of what I can only call a disease. However, a recent occurrence should lead even the incomprehending early riser to fully understand the gravity of my situation. Yesterday I slept for 16 hours (a few more hours and I would have stumbled innocently into a coma). I woke several times during that period. Once to remove my shirt, once to remove my jeans and one final time to start the paper I had been meaning to write. Wait no, I mean to turn off the light and get under the covers. At this point I honestly intended to flee the bed. I really did. The clock had already struck 5 a.m., and by all rights I had no business nestling into my own personal field of poppies since I had already passed the doctor-prescribed amount of sleep two hours before. To refute this argument: Who gets up at 5 a.m.? Fairly weak, even for a delusional rationalization, but somehow it made sense at the time. When I finally crawled out of bed at 10 a.m., having accomplished none of the things I had planned to do, I briefly contemplated suicide. One can hardly describe the feeling of sleeping for 16 hours, perhaps a cross between giving yourself a sound beating and then stealing your own shoes, and spending your whole life as a security guard on The Jerry Springer Show. In other words, utter uselessness and a desire to end your spineless slug-like existence. Plus your kidneys hurt. Then you realize that death would basically involve just going back to sleep. Sigh. And you start another day where you have won a small battle if you can stay awake for more hours than you were asleep.
Thus, what was once a pleasant release from a day’s hard wakefulness has become a nemesis, an evil, life-sucking disease to be avoided at all costs. Having attempted all manner of waking up (think buckets of water, forced bathroom trips and masochistic jettisoning of the covers) to no avail, I have finally realized that my only hope lies in avoiding sleep until the absolute last moment possible. Before surrendering to the gravitational field of my bed, I still retain my full faculties of reason. I know full well that despite my earnest setting of an alarm for 11 a.m. tomorrow, I will not wake up at 11 a.m. In fact, I will probably not wake up until 3:46 p.m. since I have to be at work at 5 p.m., and it takes me precisely 23 minutes to get ready, 51 minutes to arrive at my destination on the Metro, five minutes to walk from the Metro to my place of employment, and I can afford to be five or so minutes late. And yet, I will set the alarm for 11 a.m., because I fall asleep every night praying that the next day will be different, telling myself, like a smoker already getting the first nervous twitches of withdrawal, that I can stop any time I want. Addiction only befalls the weak, and I refuse to be weak. I am going to quit. Cold turkey. I mean it this time ? Right after I close my eyes for just a second.
Tara Dankel is a junior in the School of Foreign Service. During her few waking hours, she can be found at Uncommon Grounds shooting espresso. Into her arm.
