“Please don’t wake me, no don’t shake me, leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.” That chorus from the Lennon-McCartney song, I’m Only Sleeping, pretty much sums up the importance of sleep in our lives.
We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Put another way, we are sleeping for 25 years of our life! Rip Van Winkle slept for 100 years but his was straight through. Imagine if we could choose 25 years of our life and sleep straight through them, get them out of the way in one fell swoop. What years would you choose?
I’d always been a good sleeper. That is until I got older, maybe around 60. As a child I slept, on non-school days, until about eleven. That changed when I was nine and spent time in the hospital for a burst appendix. After that I became an early riser and learned to love the morning. I am definitely a morning person and love seeing and hearing the world wake up. I love to watch the world get brighter, to hear the birds start to chirp, and thoroughly enjoy this mostly quiet time.
My sleep, after about age 60, started becoming more sporadic. It did seem to have a pattern though. Go to bed by 10, wake up between 2:30 and 3:30, try hard to fall back to sleep, and finally succeed at about 5. Those of you with similar patterns know how little there is to do at 3 am. I did, eventually, find something that worked to get me back to sleep most of the time. I imagined myself walking through the old green pigments factory I used to work in. I barely made it from one end to the other without falling asleep first.
Time for a shout out to blackout curtains! If you have trouble sleeping, and haven’t tried these, rush right to your laptop or tablet and order some now. If you order them this morning, from Amazon, you can probably have them tomorrow. I love Amazon!! Maybe not their HR practices, but, no political rants in this blog.
I’ll end today with some more Beatles lyrics from I’m Only Sleeping. “When I wake up early in the morning, lift my head I’m still yawning, when I’m in the middle of a dream, stay in bed float upstream.”
Ahh, sleep and the Beatles…two wonderful things.
Enjoy your day. Maybe sneak a nap in.
A Semi-retired Kind of Life 