One Third of Our Lives
We spend roughly one-third of our life asleep as a biological imperative. My relationship with sleep kind of tells my life story, not in dreams but in the pure mechanics of when I went to bed and when I got up. Oddly, sleep has seldom been a neutral element in my life. It's been something that either prevented me from doing something or enabled me.
I had a bedtime enforced by the adults in my life until about a month before I went into the Army. Kids in my house went to bed when they were told. Whether they went to sleep or not was up to them. I argued against it for years but it never did any good. The only time I stayed up past 9:00 on a school night was if I had neglected to do a chore. My old man pulled me out of bed one night about 11:00 because we were out of firewood. We heated the house with a wood stove, and my negligence caused a crisis I had to fix by myself on a frigid January night. Never happened again.
I was a farm kid in high school. Summers and winter work days always meant an early start to the day. Crops in the field and livestock don't respect the wishes of teenage boys. I got up with the sun, even if the night before involved other behavior teenagers are known for.
The next chapter, the Army, had rules about sleep that I wish more places would adopt, honestly. Every duty day starts early with PT (physical training). They start trying to make you tired as soon as you get out of your rack. The beautiful part of Army life, the part they figured out, is that it is the solemn duty of every junior enlisted man to sleep wherever and whenever possible. If you tell a platoon of GIs to wait under a tree for a truck that's going to take them somewhere, half of them (me included) will be snoring inside of five minutes. It's even more pronounced when they are in the field or deployed.
I went straight from the military to the state Division of Prisons as a guard. I was assigned, as newbies often are, to third shift. Those hours give you a relationship with sleep that is upside down. For two years, I watched men sleep. This includes the inmates and most of my fellow guards. There were elaborate systems in place to issue warnings when the captain was making rounds and everyone had to be awake. The guys on the gun towers couldn't sleep either. They have a mechanical clock that has to be punched every 15 minutes for the entire shift or they get written up. I was so damn happy the day I transferred to first shift.
I spent eight years in that mad house. I picked up a DUI in my first year there and got sober behind it at 22. I stayed that way through the rest of the job and past the day I quit. Then, a few months after my 30th birthday and about two years after I left the prison, I relapsed. It took until I was 43 before I got sober again. During that time I didn't go to sleep, I passed out. The unconsciousness wasn't restful or appreciated. The bottle was in charge, not me. I've been sober for the past 17 years and have my self respect back now.
In recovery, I suddenly had choices again, and I did what a lot of people do. I got addicted to healthy living, to the extreme. I counted every calorie. I weighed my food on a scale. I set crazy goals in endurance cycling (10,000 miles a year, 80+ rides of 100 miles or more). And I slept like it was the most important thing in the world. I tried, and succeeded, in getting eight hours of sleep almost every night. I kept records. I made graphs. I read books.
When I retired, I got a real curveball thrown to me. I never saw it coming. I picked up a viral infection that almost made an invalid of me. For 18 months, I slept 20 hours a day and there was never a moment when I didn't feel exhausted. I lost a chunk of my life that I'll never get back. I am mostly recovered. I still get tired more easily than I ever thought possible, but it's nothing like it was.
Today I deal with sleep like a lot of older people. It takes a lot of intention to get seven or eight consecutive hours of sleep. The minute I wake up in the night, I have the impulse to get out of bed. If I give in to that, I end up with a broken, patchwork existence, falling asleep involuntarily every few hours while watching TV with Wonder Woman or sitting in the passenger seat of the car. I don't want to live like that. I don't think anyone does. It takes real discipline to resist it, though.
As someone who values autonomy, freedom and self determination for all people as innate human rights, it is ironic that a basic human need we all have has been out of my control for long stretches of my life. Whether it was my parents, Army sergeants, prison bosses, bottles of cheap bourbon, or a mysterious illness, control of that vital one third of my life has been taken or ceded more often than not. These days, it's totally up to me to get the rest required to function, which is great even if it is a struggle. Autonomy, freedom and self determination don't equal easy. If it's worth having, it's worth the struggle.
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