I’ve never particularly cared for sleeping. It’s a ghastly waste of time, all those hours spent doing nothing, discovering nothing, accomplishing nothing.
When I was in Mrs. Martin’s kindergarten class, we would follow our snack time of Kool-Aid and Nilla Wafers with “rest time,” which was a flawed plan from the start —pump a bunch of five year-olds full of sugar and tell them to go lie on the floor. But each day, we’d all unfold our paper-thin vinyl mats and have our restful moment.
Twenty of us, lying prone on the floor, a tableau of tiny bodies littering the linoleum like the victims of a sniper attack. And I would lay there, wide awake, amazed by the classmates who were able to actually go to sleep in public. In what sort of homes were they being raised that they were allowed to just drop to the floor and lose consciousness? We were not housecats. This was not something to be encouraged.