I sleep like a man who harbours a deep, personal grudge against rest. At night, that is. I retire to bed with the noblest of intentions, only for my central nervous system to stage an immediate and violent insurrection.
First come the nightmares—a continuous, unprompted film festival of horror playing on a loop behind my eyelids. Then comes the twitching. I lie there bouncing like an electrocuted haddock; recently I executed a nocturnal leap of such alarming force that I very nearly cleared the headboard altogether.
Military service leaves one with various souvenirs, and my own includes a condition formally known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—or, as I prefer to think of it, Proper Twisted System Displacement. The result is that by seven in the morning, I feel less like a rested human being and more like a discarded sack of wet laundry.
The solution to this daily catastrophe is not medical science, but the strategic power nap.
The routine is now well-established. I return from my morning jog, crawling through the front door wheezing, broken, and making noises like a Victorian traction engine. I haul myself upstairs to shower and change, descend to the living room, and collapse into the armchair.
Then comes the snooze—a brief, glorious, highly concentrated burst of unconsciousness far superior to anything on offer during the night.
A proper power nap cannot be forced; it requires precise atmospheric conditions. Merely having eyes full of grit and feeling vaguely tired is insufficient. You must reach a state of physical exhaustion where your eyelids lodge a formal, written grievance with senior management regarding the fact that they are still open. That is power nap time.
Admittedly, the immediate aftermath of a nap can be disorienting. One occasionally wakes up feeling as though one has been exhumed. But the remedy is simple: stretch the creaking limbs, stumble to the kitchen, and put the kettle on. Caffeine sorts out most of life’s major errors. Within ten minutes, one is once again equipped to face the world.
There are those, usually younger, who view afternoon napping with sneering condescension. “Look at the old fart,” they whisper. “Asleep in his chair again.”
To them I say: let them laugh. They remain tragically ignorant of the sheer, restorative power of the fifteen-minute shut-eye. Their day will come. The knees will start to creak, the nightmares will arrive, the morning jog will feel like a battle with gravity, and they, too, will reach for the armchair.
Right. The kettle has boiled, the afternoon stretches ahead, and my eyelids have just tendered their resignation.
I’m off for a nap.