Insomniacs and college students alike know the immense value of sleep. My favorite part of the day is right when I’m drifting off to sleep and I am completely relaxed. No matter how much work I have or haven’t done, I always try to not let it interfere with my precious rest time. Reality is put on hold for a few hours while the subconscious takes over. Last night I dreamed it was my twenty-first birthday and I was waving my license in the face of some waitress – a sweet but brief escape from the harsh, depressing truth.
The worst part of my day is when the alarm wrests me from sweet slumber, ordering me out of bed for my nine o’clock class and reminding me of that big red bar on my license that says, “AGE 21 IN 2002.” Ever had an hour-long nine o’clock class then have an hour or two break until the next one? You’re tired, you want to at least attempt to get some work done, but utter exhaustion from having dragged yourself out of bed at what is in college time the crack of dawn prevents you from getting any real work done. The words swim on the page and you can’t make any sense of them. Your head begins to droop, but of course your apartment or dorm seems much too far to be worth the effort it takes to walk there. By the time you got home, you’d barely have any time to rest before having to get up again for your next class.
I was having these very thoughts last Thursday. Class was only forty-five minutes away, so walking home was out of the question. One can’t read Coriolanus in a stupor of fatigue, so I tried to take a brief nap in the library. The gray sofa-like chairs seemed my best bet. Using my backpack as a pillow, I struggled to get comfortable. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t find the right position, and my attempt at sleep was thwarted.
“Why can’t they just have nice, squishy, “sleepable” places to sit in the library,” I thought. In the whole building, there’s not one object even remotely appropriate for sleeping. As I left, I remembered the construction taking place on the first floor and wondered what they were doing with it. I then had an epiphany. What if they turned it into a giant napping room? They could put in a bunch of cots and hammocks and play Chopin on low volume from a boom box in the corner. Think of the benefits if we all had a little more rest: we would be far more attentive and productive in our next class. There is an undeniably huge difference between having a nine o’clock class versus a ten o’clock class. I know I feel infinitely better on days when I get that extra hour or so of sleep and don’t have to stumble into class late and still in my pajamas. With a napping room, we’d still be tired for nine o’clock class, but a brief nap from ten to eleven would vastly improve the rest of the day. We would actually be physically capable of paying attention, and professors would no longer have occasion to feel offended by drooping eyes.
Remember in preschool when naps were mandatory? No one ever wanted to sleep, but the teachers, for the sake of having a few moments of peace, made us sleep anyway. Why is it that when we finally want our teachers to tell us to go to bed, they won’t? Of course, it doesn’t make sense to have mandatory nap time in college. For one thing, there wouldn’t be enough cots and hammocks to accommodate everyone at once. Logistics aside, I believe that having sleeping places available on campus would greatly improve student performance, morale, and health. The administration must face facts: what good are all those books in the library if we’re all sleepy to read them?