Sleepy

So sleepy all the time… It’s tempting to just close your eyes and take a nap. During lectures, during study hall, during meals… Even while standing with your friends, waiting for something to get started. During those first few days, you were so energetic, so excited and eager to run around doing anything and everything. You got up early and went to bed late. Now, the one thing that is most often on your mind is sleep. The professor lectures for hours at a time. What he says may be interesting, but all the same, the monotony of one person speaking in the same voice for all that time… Your eyes start to close against your will. Stay awake, you tell yourself. Don’t fall asleep. The drowsiness still settles over you like a soft, warm, cotton blanket. Go to sleep, says the blanket. Sleep is good. Your mind wanders. You hear the professor speaking, but do not hear what he says. Suddenly, you wake yourself up with a jolt. The professor continues to drone on, not noticing, or at least paying no heed to your state of (un)consciousness. Dangit. What is he talking about? How long were you out? Words and symbols are scrawled across the board. Were they there before? You look down at your notes and see pencil marks that make no sense at all, words that start out as potential words but end in a jumble of illegible squiggles. You make an effort to stay awake this time. Pay attention, you tell yourself. Don’t slip like that again.

After class, you walk out with a mild headache, wondering how much you missed. Now seems like a good time to take a nice long nap. How nice it would be to be able to go back to the dorms and crash for a few hours. Or perhaps a few days.

But no matter how tempting the sleep is, there is always something to do. An activity to go to. Something to practice. Research to be done. Books to be read.

You wish that there was a way to put your life on pause, a way to get a time turner and sleep for a few more hours, or to go to Narnia and spend a few days sleeping there before heading back out the armoire to find that no time has lapsed. You are always being rushed from one thing to the next, and it’s hard to find time to truly relax and recuperate. At home, it is sometimes possible to take a nap, and catch up on lost sleep. But even then, afterwards, the nap feels like time wasted. There were so many things that could have been done during those hours. Sleep is so unfortunately necessary; it sometimes seems annoying, like a disability that prevents you from doing the things you want to do.

You tell yourself that you can just hold up until everything is over. Yet after this, there are still more things to get started on. Another set of classes to take, more studying to complete. The list of things to do is never-ending.