I have to say I hate sleeping. Sleeping shouldn’t be necessary and has always felt like a big waste of time.
Probably not coincidentally, I hate being woken up. Or, more accurately, I hate being torn out of sleep, and the groggy, foggy, stupid feeling I get when an alarm slices through my dreams, with no regard to whether it’s a good time to poke me or not.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody and nothing can save me from the need to sleep. I am, after all, human. And, as far as I can tell, sleep is critical to my survival — however much I do or don’t like it.
As for the waking up thing, this is where technology comes in. I’ve been using Sleep Cycle for a couple of years now because it magically knows the best time to tap on my shoulder and gently suggests it’s time to wake up. Ten minutes one way or the other seems to make a huge difference. Anything else — all of my old alarm clocks, for example — seem brutal and primitive in comparison.
I’ve also learned a lot about my sleep patterns. Where and when I snore, for instance, and how many times a night I wake up and toss around. It’s fun to game the percentages, to get as many nights in a row of high sleep-quality numbers or to figure out why they’re low. But the best part is still the gentle nudge every morning, telling me to wake up right as I was going to wake up anyway. Magical.
I still hate sleeping. I’ll always hate sleeping. But Sleep Cycle has made me hate it a little bit less. And it’s made me hate waking up a lot less.
