But I'm not tired!

On nights that I can't fall asleep, I tend to find myself lying awake, thinking about how weird sleep is.

If we treated sleep as a natural process this is how it would work:

Every night, our bodies automatically grow tired. When we feel our bodies beginning this shutting down process, we find a safe and comfortable place to lie down and reach a state of just-barely living. Our temperature drops, heart rate goes down, etc. but then we naturally wake up to the sunlight in the morning, rested and ready to go for another full day, until the next night.

But of course, barely anything in the world is natural anymore so this is what we do:

Every night when all the good TV shows are over we go into a room where there is a big squishy soft mattress, we close all the curtains, shut off the lights, we lay (lie?) down, and we wait. We just lay (lie?) there waiting for our body to catch on to the fact that it is now convenient for us to sleep. Once it finally gets the memo, we go into the same state of just-barely living I spoke about before, only to jar it awake with an alarm clock ringing in our pitch black room. We now expect our body to instantaneously get the message that it is now convenient for us to be awake.

It's not supposed to work like that! We are not computers. We can't just put ourselves into "sleep" mode and shut down on request. And even computers need some time to be groggy after being in sleep mode.

We laugh at videos of puppies and children and other creatures (Yeah, I called a baby a creature. And I was being nice. Typically I call them aliens.) falling asleep in their dinner, or on the stairs, or in other places we've decided are "weird" or unnatural. But I kind of think it's weirder and more unnatural that we just lay (lie? ...damnit! which one?!) in a bed and wait.

Puppies and babies and other little creatures only have to worry about surviving. They don't have to get up for work, or be anywhere important. So they can sleep whenever and wherever they happen to feel tired. But we, as actual people, don't give ourselves that "luxury" (even though it should probably be considered a necessity). We have such unnaturally structured lives that we only have an 8 hour or less window in which we can sleep. (For those of you thinking "Psh, I'd be SO lucky to have 8 whole hours...let me point out that you are currently reading from a pointless blog lacking any direction, written by a non-famous, unimportant 23 year old. So, you're not THAT busy.) But anyways, we don't have time to run around and play until our body gets so worn out that we just flop down and sleep. We only have time to chug an unmeasured amount of NyQuil and lie down and wait for sleep to hit us. ...And while we're laying there we might as well just send out a few texts...

The next time you're awkwardly laying in your bed demanding that your body fall asleep for you, think about how strange the whole process is. And how puppies and aliens children probably have the right idea.

"The cats nestle close to their kittens,
The lambs have laid down their sheep
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear,
Please go the f*#& to sleep."
-Adam Mansbach, Go the F**k to Sleep