Sleeping is Weird

Have you ever wondered why we have to sleep? It has always seemed to be such a waste of time, to me. Life is short so why waste 1\3 of it in la-la land? That’s one of the many questions I have for God. (I assume He will be taking questions because The Crash Dummies said He would.) Click here to listen.

There are many opinions and ways to understand sleep. My mother loved to sleep, which was a precious commodity in her life as a mother of five children. She often took naps, which we children considered a great opportunity to make requests she would normally reject. She quickly maneuvered to block our highly successful strategy by making a rule that we could only ask her a question if she was sitting up and drinking coffee. RATS!

My mother spent the last couple of years of her life bedfast. Since she was not chronically ill, I questioned her about staying in bed. She informed me that it was her life-long dream to stay in bed all day, so being bedfast was a dream come true for her. All of the time I knew her she said her dream was to hire a young man to fan her while she slept with a large feather fan and wake her every hour and tell her, “You can go back to sleep, Mrs. McConnell.” She reminded me of a song by Little Willie John my older sisters used to listen to. Click here to listen.

We have a new granddaughter and she spends time with us each week. It is fascinating to watch her grow and learn and connect some dots. When she hears my wife’s voice or sees her face, Vivian smiles. When she looks at me there is bewilderment on her face – like she is saying, “Who’s he and, why exactly is he here?” You see, Nana holds her, rocks her, feeds her and changes her wet, poopy diapers. Me, I hold her while she screams while Nana goes to fix her bottle. Nana – useful. Big guy with the white beard – not so much. No smiles for Papa. And like all babies, she loves to sleep. That is unless we are asleep.

Since I considered sleeping a waste of time, I tried to do as little sleeping as possible. All of the way through high school and college, I bragged that I only needed four hours of sleep a night. It was not unusual for me to stay up all night, causing mischief, and then just moving on to the next day. My buddies and I would walk for miles at night: crawling up on her roof and waking up my girlfriend, dropping by the bakery (eight miles from home) at 3:30 am for really fresh goodies, TPing houses, setting off fireworks we had made, building a fire and sitting around it smoking and talking, skinny dipping in a local pond. Great times.

I could get by with little sleep, but I had no idea how that lack of sleep affected me. When I graduated from seminary and began getting eight hours of sleep per night, I discovered some amazing things. I had thought everyone fell asleep behind the wheel of the car. It was one of the challenges of driving. I had awakened many times in the median. Quite exhilarating. I discovered I wasn’t nearly as bad-tempered as I thought I was.  Discovering I could sit and read for more than 20 minutes before going to sleep was shocking. I’m thinking that ability would have made studying a bit more productive in college.

Now old age has crept up on me and my approach to and understanding of sleep has again changed. Now I love to sleep. Unfortunately, my internal body clock is set so the best time for me to sleep is 4 am until noon. While in college, I incessantly signed up for morning classes and consistently failed to show up for them. If I had known this while in college I could have blamed my absences on a broken body clock. That sounds better than most of the excuses I used.

I have no idea if they are connected, but since receiving my kidney (Thanks, Tim.) transplant, 12 hours of sleep a day seems about right. Sleeping is great because snuggling under the covers I can finally get warm. Then the dreams come. In those dreams I can: hang out with friends I haven’t seen in years; talk to my Dad and late brother; talk to old girlfriends and be reminded why it was a good idea (for them) to not get married; experience again some youthful adventures, awakening wondering how I managed to survive to adulthood, and have some dreams that are completely weird and wonder just what sludge is sloshing around in my brain.

I’ll write more about sleep, but right now I need a nap.

Copyright © 2020, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Bill McConnell is an Interim Minister, a Church Transformation consultant and a Christian Leadership Coach. He is a frequent speaker at Church Transformation events. His latest book on church transformation is DEVELOPING A SIGNIFICANT CHURCH and is available at Westbow Press. He can be contacted @ bill45053@gmail.com. Connect with him on Facebook @ William T. McConnell or on Twitter @billmc45053 or visit his Amazon Author Page @ Amazon author page