Dave T's Pros and Cons of Stuff Everyone Has: Sleeps

At the end of a long day, you come home. You watch some TV, maybe read a book. Or work on your ship in a bottle. Or cut letters out of a magazine to make a ransom note.

Then you get into your pajamas, or just a T-shirt and undies, or just nakedness, and you get into bed. You shut the light. You close your eyes. You drift away.

You wake up in the morning. Or, if you work nights, maybe you wake up in the afternoon. You could really wake up at any point in the day.

And you do this pretty much every day of your life.

These are SLEEPS.

Don’t know what they are?

Merriam Webster defines sleeps as “the natural periodic suspension of consciousness during which the powers of the body are restored.”

That’s a lot better than what I described above, which was basically “when you close your eyes for a long time and then you open them again,” which distinguishes sleep from death, but doesn’t distinguish it from a four-year coma.

Pros:

• A huge industry is built around sleeps. Bed makers. Pillow and sheet manufacturers. Pharmaceutical companies that make sleep medication. The people who make those sleep masks that women only seem to wear in movies. And Sleepytime^® tea.

• Without sleeps, we wouldn’t have dreams. Check out my pros on that topic. I would like to add a new pro: dreams have inspired a lot of amazing art of all kinds, the most recent work being Inception.

And without sleep, calling New York “the city that never sleeps” wouldn’t distinguish it from any other city.

• Without sleeps, life would be one big day. So if you were having a bad day, that day would never end. Sleeps give us a chance to put something bad behind us, get boogie-crusts in the corners of our eyes, and wake up refreshed and ready to try again.

• If we were awake all day and night, our employers would have a legitimate reason to make us work longer hours! I HATE THIS THOUGHT SO MUCH!!!!

• When you’re sad about stuff, sometimes sleep is the only escape.

• Some people are jerks. If we never slept, then jerks would have eight more hours a day to do jerkytime things.

• No sleeps means no naps. And that’s bad news for children and old folks. And for me and people like me who are just lazy and sleepy all day long.

• Certain people look their absolute cutest when they have bed head.

• The time when young children make their sleeps is the only time their parents get a moment’s peace.

• If we didn’t have sleeps, then we wouldn’t have beds. And if we didn’t have beds, we’d have to make all of our sweet lovins on the floor. And that leads to rug burns. Or on the couch, and then there’s just not enough room to do anything fancy, like the Westward-Facing Raven, Bob’s Your Uncle, Keplers’ Ellipses, Chutes and Ladders, Scarborough Fair, Too Close for Comfort, Charles De Gaulle Airport, Fruit by the Foot, or the Robert Guillaume Surprise.

Total Pros: 10

Cons:

• If we didn’t have sleeps, we would have so much more time to do things. On average, we spend a third of our lives asleep. That means without sleep, it would basically be like we lived an extra third of our lives. We’d be smarter, more accomplished, and more awesome. We'd have more time to do charity work and call our grandparents.Those of us who play the guitar would be way better players.

• Without sleeps, we wouldn’t have dreams. Check out my cons on that topic.

• If we didn’t need sleeps, then we wouldn’t have insomnia. As a frequent sufferer of this particular ailment, I can vouch for its suckyness. We wouldn’t have restless limb syndrome, sleepwalking, night terrors, and drunkards pooping the bed.

• A lot of people, especially old people, die in their sleeps. Without sleeps, they wouldn’t die! Maybe ever! Some of us could be immortal were it not for sleeps!

• Sometimes when teenage boys are asleep, they have a nocturnal emission. This is a terrible squishy ordeal for the boys, and probably not a picnic for the moms who have to wash their undies.

• Sleeps cause snoring in some people. I hate snoring.

• Sleeps lead to morning breath. I hate morning breath.

• When people fall asleep at sleepovers, pranks are done to them. No one would ever have to scratch their noses with a hand full of shaving cream or wake up with perverse graffiti on their faces if we didn’t have sleeps.

Total Cons: 8

So, 10 Pros, 8 Cons, I am keeping sleeping.

It's good to know that I haven't wasted over 10 years of my life on something that I later decided was unnecessary.

‘Til next time, Ciao!

Dave T