Sleep Auction

I slept through kindergarten, more than once and my father, a fair and diplomatic man, let me sleep. After I crawled from my pink canopy bed, I found my daddy in the kitchen and he knelt down in front of me, looked into my weeping eyes and said, "You are the one who chose to sleep." Even at the tender age of five, I knew that he did not understand my deep-rooted relationship with dreams  as alive as he.

I am quite convinced that I met my sleep quota for life early due to frequent teenage sleep-fests. The hours of Kodachrome dreams, the fly-and-swoosh, slo-mo-running, alarm ringing, rushing to get to class on time, out of breath during roll call, late for first period again, easy sleep, deep sleep, unappreciated sleep, teenage nights are long gone.

And forget about the nap. The anywhere, anytime, youthful snooze is extinct. After endless nights of sleeplessness, a nap is just another form of self-torture. A tired four-year-old refuses even the most posh, in a bed, during the day, lights out, curtains drawn, maybe mommy will read a book and sing a song nap. I would pay good money for an uninterrupted twenty minutes on a cold cement floor.

Last spring I fell asleep in the car, closed my eyes "for five minutes" and woke up two hours later. I was supposed to be swimming, in a class that I paid money for, a graded class, a graded university class. I accepted the two hours, felt like five minutes, hope nobody saw me, can't believe I slept through a class at forty-one nap as a gift to myself.

Oh sleep, where art thou? Do you find it disheartening that I am blogging instead of dreaming? Have mercy and sell me a simple eight-hour block of shut-eye.  Do I hear seven?  Six?  Will you give me five, five, five, four-and-a-half? Sold!