7 Glorious Hours · 24 October 2020
It might not seem that significant, but I got seven glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep a week or so ago.
Pain is an interesting thing. It makes you want to sleep, but it keeps you awake. At least that is what it does to me. Or maybe it is just that pain has kept me awake since the last week of August, and so I long for sleep.
(The next couple paragraphs seem to come out of the blue, but they really do fit. Trust me.)
I do not know if you have those conversations at supper, but we do. Those conversations where you ask what one food you would want on a desert island if you had a magic refrigerator. Or who you would take to said desert island if you knew you would never be rescued. Everybody chimes in and says why. They are great conversations with kids, and even young adults.
Those conversations have changed over the years. Rather, the questions have changed. One of my favorite questions is: If you did not need to eat or sleep, which would you rather not do?
I have always answered that I would rather not sleep. (See, I told you the paragraphs would fit.) Sure, there are plusses to not needing to eat. The first that comes to mind, of course, is that you do not need to poop. The downside to not eating though is that there is all that glorious food. Food, glorious food. (Somebody even wrote a song like that.) And people who think that a meatless dairyless diet does not have any glorious food, are certainly mistaken.
But I digress. (If digressing from a digression is even possible.)
I always answer that I would choose not to sleep because there is so much that you could do in a day if you did not need to sleep. I would write and read and draw. I would play music. I would learn and learn and learn. Not that I do not try to do those things now, but I would love to be able to have six or seven or eight more hours in the day to do so. It is just that sleep gets in the way.
Or so I thought.
After not really sleeping much since the last week in August, I might change my dinner conversation answer from not sleeping to not eating. If I could survive without having to do one or the other, I think I would now stop eating before I stopped sleeping. Yes, I know that they are both necessary and that I do not really get to stop doing either. But certainly deprivation gives you a sense of what you are missing. And I have really missed sleep.
Which brings me back to the beginning. After nearly seven weeks of fitful, broken, non-continuous sleep, I finally had a breakthrough. I finally slept seven hours in a row. Seven glorious hours. Seven wonderful hours. Seven continuous hours. I never knew I missed sleep so much until I actually got to sleep again. I do not know if I will get to experience those glorious consecutive hours of sleep again right away or not (turns out one in a row was it at the time of this writing), but I look forward to when I do. For I realize how wrong I have been for eschewing sleep. It is necessary. It is refreshing. It is wonderful. Especially, when it is seven glorious continuous hours of restful sleep.
It might not seem significant to most people, but seven hours of uninterrupted sleep truly is a glorious thing.
(Look at that. I did not even mention that the pain was from shingles, or that you should get your shingles vaccination.)
© 2020 Michael T. Miyoshi
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I’m happy for you! What good news.
— Lydia · 26 October 2020, 08:27 ·