Worse than construction/landscaping noises

I want to write about sleep today, but not because Kevin overslept and I got up heavy-eyed and yawning after a solid 8 hours nestled atop my Sleep Number. The idea of sleep, or rather the idea that I should put some thought into sleeping, occurred to me on Saturday when I woke up at 9:30 and gave going back to sleep my best effort. I wasn’t able to – my brain became too alert on my trip to the bathroom, rushed though it was to preserve that sleepy state – and I was a little depressed. It wasn’t that I was amazingly tired; I just wanted to be able to sleep the prolonged, joyous sleep of a teenager again.

The sleep of a teenager is blissful. I don’t claim to understand it (something about the exhaustion of growing or utter laziness) or to be an expert on it, since my latest sleep-ins pale before the more serious exploits of my 1 or 2 p.m. friends. For me it was usually a solid 10 or 11 a.m. and while that is not particularly impressive, I still remember the wrenching feeling of waking up, the reluctance to roll over and face the sunshine. I also remember the way that my meddling parents would open my door and let my dog in to wake me up if I slept too late. The strategy of turning best pals against each other (or me against her, she wasn’t phased by my wallowing her with a pillow) is rivaled only by the frustration of waking up to construction/landscaping noises.

I’m not exactly sure what I miss about teenage sleeping. I don’t think that it is the sleeping in – I have come far in valuing my weekends since my school days. I think it is the way of sleeping more than the length of the sleep. As a teenager and in my earliest years of college I always went to sleep right away and slept all through the night with my mouth slack and drool pooling on my pillow. I think that the reluctance to get up has more to do with that state of extreme relaxation than with laziness or growing pains.

Last night, for example, I went to bed rather early (11:15) and slept fine until 4. After waking up at 4 I spent the next three hours in the state of semi-awareness that is frustrating and simultaneously pleasant; waking up every few minutes and glancing at the clock always assures you that you have so much time left to sleep but the waking up so often makes the sleep pointless. It's always a little unnerving, like staying awake too long after taking cold medicine. My dreams during those brief patches are almost always about work; I used to have the most stressful dreams about scrolling through Word.

I never experienced the half-awake state when I was sleeping the drenching sleep of a teenager. My brain never buzzed with worries about work and fragments of songs left in my head. I just slept and my first thought on waking up was always when I would have time to take a nap.