Night for Day

I’m generally asleep until late-morning, unless I have some important early business to attend to. In that case, I force myself to wake up sooner than my usual. Under such circumstances, I’m awake – but sleepy.

I don’t get up at once as soon as I awaken. I stay in bed for a while – for a long while – trying to decide whether I had slept enough or need to sleep some more. Sometimes, I return to sleep. At other times, I’d manage to sit up, eyes still closed and then quickly doze off again.

Often, my first meal for the day is lunch. I would have for lunch what others take for breakfast. Then, I get ready for the world!

I rush through my daytime tasks in the afternoon: buy necessary stuff, make important calls, go to the bank, have my health check-up, meet people etc. Occasionally I’d find little time for idle talk with friends.  

Towards dusk, I increasingly feel lousier. And my mind begins to get duller and duller. By around 6 p.m., I can hardly remember how many days there are in a week. Seven, right?

Okay, I know some of you are sneering at me for this revelation. But there are also others who might be smiling, those who have realized that life is good when you have come to your right spot under the sun – or moon. Definitely, sleeping away one’s hours doesn’t look like the best way to live.

It seems like a nice thing to work 18 hours a day in order to make money. There are a lot of “success” stories of people who live their lives that way. They postpone rest and leisure trying to amass material wealth. And, true, some do get rich. Then that’s the end of it.

Those who become rich by working so very hard soon have to give away their wealth. It’s not out of sheer generosity; they are forced to expend of their hard-earned fortunes in exchange for some relief from their many sufferings. They pay doctors to repair their wrecked and aching bodies. Some pay people to listen to their lonely stories. 

Now, let’s go back to me. Yes, the few hours at mid-afternoon is such a short period to enjoy sharp wakefulness. But I don’t start snoring at seven-thirty in the evening. I’m not even in bed yet by then, unless I’m ill, very ill.

My body and mind pick up again after dinner, normally at about eight. I watch a little TV, and then I read—I’m not even halfway reading the books I’ve collected from second-hand bookshops.

We each have our best hours. Some need to be jolted in the morning by a screaming alarm clock. Some get up easily, with just the whiff of fresh coffee to get them moving. Then they go to work. By about 10 a.m., their blood pressure is shooting up. At this time, I’m just about getting out of bed.

There are so-called “day” people and there are “night” people. The better part of my day is mostly at night. My afternoon high is only the beginning.

I wish I could wake up early in the morning, have a day job, come home at night and be asleep by ten after watching the late-night news on TV. My days used to go like that. I once had a normal, daytime life.

The pattern of my daily life has since changed. There are now more books to read, more DVD movies to watch. And there’s also more work to do, work that can be done only without the interruption of phones ringing and friends dropping by.

I’m most productive at night. I don’t just sit there doing crossword puzzle or scanning the TV channel looking for some sensible show to watch. I don’t surf the Internet, either, to see something bizarre to break the boredom, like those controversial sex videos on YouTube recently.

Health professionals say a grown-up person needs about 7 to 8 hours of sleep a day. Such long period of rest is supposedly essential in order for the body to recover from the day’s toils. But does this mean that you can only sleep at night? What if you’re not sleepy?

I’ve found good use for my wakeful night hours. Work. I’m normally up all night, writing screenplays, making articles for some Internet magazines, writing this column. Sometimes I do meditation, I need it to relieve myself of the mental stress from the kind of work I do.

Now and then, however, I am forced to take the normal course. I have to work mostly daytime when a foreign TV production company sends me a job order. They do it two to three times a year. Each job lasts between 20 to 45 days. 

By the way, are we to take a good rest in one chunk? Some people I know do very well dozing off four times into two-hour naps, for a total of eight hours of sleep a day. They enjoy excellent health. Most of all, they are very productive despite their ripe age.

The reason, perhaps, why everybody tries to get to sleep only at night is not because that’s the way our bodies would want it, but because the whole customary process of going to bed and getting up is such a time-consuming activity. We can’t afford to do it several times a day.

If it takes the normal people a couple of hours to get going again after each night’s sleep, imagine how much total time it would take if we sleep and wake up three or four times a day.

So I take my sleep in one chunk, 7 or 8 hours once a day, day or night, but mostly day. It works for me. Oh, it’s 4 a.m. now—my bedtime. Goodnight.

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