I was driving to work today and thinking about my sleeping habits. Mr. W’s daughter left on a 5-day trip to New York, so we have the house to ourselves. Mr. W embraced the freedom by returning to his old nudist self, whereas I found nothing more luxurious than falling asleep for the past 2 nights downstairs in the living room with the TV on, alone. Of course Mr. W and my parents, people with wholesome “normal” sleeping habits, think I’m the most undisciplined sleeper ever, too lazy to turn off the lights and TV and go upstairs to bed when I’m getting tired. Deep inside — okay, not even very deep — I don’t want to go upstairs and lay in bed properly and go to sleep. The fact is I can knock out within the first commercial when a TV’s on, but if I were laying in bed upstairs, no matter how exhausted I was, I would lay there awake. It’s too proper. I fall asleep a little more easily if I were lying slightly improperly, such as perpendicular to Mr. W, or facing completely the opposite direction (sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed). There’s just something about not truly being ready for bed that makes me contrarily sleepy. It’s like falling asleep in class. You know you aren’t supposed to fall asleep, and you fight to stay awake, but all that resistance just makes it all the more tempting to doze off.

In the car this morning while parked on the freeway, I thought about my childhood. My mom made me go to bed at specific and etched-in-stone hours. She’s kinda anal about schedules, and gave me an extremely structured upbringing. Occasionally, I would beg to break the structure and a few times thought myself the luckiest girl in the world when she’d agree to let me take a cold shower instead of a hot one on a warm night, when I was allowed to have a visiting cousin or two spend the night, when I was allowed to stay up an hour past my bedtime so that I could watch a news story that the TV channel had been teasing during my permissibly awake hours. Once I was allowed to sleep in the bathtub. (I never asked for it again; it only seemed a cool idea in theory but I think in the middle of the night I took my pillow and blanket and retreated back into my bedroom.) As for the one occasion my hour-long begging finally resulted in my parents’ grant of a delay of bedtime so that I could watch a news program — I ended up never having seen the news story anyway, as my own snoring and my parents’ laughter woke me up 15 minutes into the extra hour I’d painstakingly earned. I was forced to go to bed immediately shamefaced after that. So why, as an adult, have I not retained the good sleeping habits my mother so specifically imposed on me in my impressionable childhood years?

Looking back, freedom to me had always been 1) staying up as late as I want, and 2) eating whatever and whenever I wanted. If I knew my parents were going to be home late or even not at all as I got older and was trusted to spend a few nights on my own as they traveled, the two excited thoughts that would immediately pop into my head were, “I can stay up all night! And EAT stuff without being harassed!” As an adult, vanity has reined in #2 (although food still tastes better when snuck in nibbles, as opposed to irreverently served in a plentiful plate in front of me), so the only “luxury” I allow myself is the “ha!” I get for being up all night, for not exactly going to bed or sleeping in the position I know I’m “supposed” to. Maybe the way to better sleeping habits would be to untie the deeply-rooted association in my head between “unconventional sleeping style” and “spoiling myself.”

I wonder if my cousin Mark, who also has hideous sleeping habits such as falling asleep in his car once he’s pulled into the garage instead of going in the house to bed first (I can’t say I’ve never done that), falling asleep in the day at locations and during events he was supposed to be alert, has the same psychological roots that formed his sleeping patterns.