Perchance to dream

Not being one for New Year’s resolutions, I usually bypass the traditional Dec. 31 vows. Not because I find my life to be perfect, but why spoil a perfectly gluttonous social occasion by chewing over how much exercise I’m going to commit to shortly, or what foods — like the ones in front of me on New Year’s Eve — I’m going to banish come tomorrow?

Still, I do have one slight behavior modification in mind for ‘09: I want to cut down on my sleeping. Seriously. I’ve fallen into the habit of getting something like nine hours per night of unconsciousness, which even by my generous standards is too much.

How did I quietly slip from the recommended 7-8 hours of rest per night to the lordly nine? Just lazy, I guess. To be fair, it wasn’t always like this. I’ve had periods of my life where six or so hours of sleep was the norm — during college finals, say, or on European package tours where the bus call time was always at the crack of dawn. As a rule, though, I’ve grown biologically accustomed to eight hours. But, like my waistline, this figure has somehow gradually expanded.

This actually makes me envious of people who can slide by on five or six hours of rest. I’m often amazed when I visit my Filipino aunt in New Jersey, who until recently got up every morning to head to Manhattan where she worked at the U.N. The night before, she’d be up doing some domestic chore at two in the morning: vacuuming her sala, say, or running the sewing machine, or cooking a week’s worth of meals in advance. She seemed content with four hours of shuteye a night.

Then there’s my wife Therese, who also gets by on less sleep than me. I can tell she doesn’t approve much of my somatic experiments. She especially frowns on the fact that I can drink a triple espresso at 11 p.m. and still be on the fast track to la-la land within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow. Really. I should be studied by men in lab coats holding clipboards. “How does he do it, doctor? That was an industrial-grade Ethiopian espresso, yet note the serene expression, the limp limbs… look at the way the eyes roll back in his head. It’s… it’s uncanny!”

Why this attraction to sleep? Well, people are always after you to pursue a hobby of some kind. Mine’s dreaming. It’s free and doesn’t require a lot of travel.

Sleep is also a luxury, of sorts. Something the modern person desires, but always rues the lack of. Dare to be different, I say. People keep saying life is short. Maybe it will seem so when I’ve reached Rip Van Winkle age. Right now, though, life seems plenty long. Shaving off a few days here and there in the grip of Morpheus doesn’t seem too extravagant.

I’m also not ruling out the possibility that I sleep longer because I sleep later — generally 2 or 3 a.m. each night. Or maybe it’s the recent overseas trips that are playing havoc with my internal clock, making it harder to stabilize. Or maybe I can’t think of too many pressing reasons to be alert and conscious in the morning… so I steal a few more zzz’s from the Dream Factory. If I were putting all this extra sleep to good use, such as dreaming up the next iPod or green car, I wouldn’t feel so troubled by it. But I’m not.

How troubled am I? Not enough to lose any sleep over it, believe me.

But still, I made a halfhearted resolution to cut back to eight hours, just for decency’s sake. It happened because I did a little math and realized something: my one extra hour of sleep per night, multiplied by 365 and divided by 24, results in 15 whole days of lost consciousness per year! Fifteen days! Think what I could be doing with that time. I could be catching up on a lot of boxed sets of TV shows on DVD; but I probably wouldn’t be doing that in my spare time anyway. Or I could be filling that extra time with exercise. No, rather unlikely.

Or, as my wife pointed out, I could be learning French. When she heard me griping about my sleeping habit, she hauled out her Berlitz guide and pointed to its promise on the cover: “Learn French in 30 days!” “You could be half-fluent in French if you used that extra 15 days more wisely!” she tutted. Yes, it’s true. (Oui, c’est vrai.) Fifteen extra days a year is like an unexpected windfall, a bonus, a kind of mental taxpayer stimulus check to get the old ambition stirring. Who knows how I might spend it?

The first step, of course, would be sticking to my resolution. This proved harder than I thought. Sleeping up in Baguio after the New Year’s Eve festivities, feeling the cool, fresh air and hearing nothing but crickets and the occasional leftover watusi crackling outside my window, I felt so full of good-natured resolve about my new life that… I rolled over and fell back into unconsciousness for another sweet hour.

Okay, maybe it was just a false start. Maybe I’ll have to do something drastic, like set an alarm. It’s an attainable goal, I keep telling myself. Dare to dream, I like to say. Or rather, I daresay I like to dream. A lot. So we’ll take this sleep rollback program one step — maybe 15 minutes — at a time.

After all, the possibilities of what one could do with an extra 15 days per year… well, it just gets me so excited that I can feel the yawning muscles in my jaw start to contract, I find myself stretching to the heavens and, before you know it… well, I’ll get back to you with the results. I have to sleep on it.