Unpowered naps
Apr 15th, 2007 by francis
Power nap.
If ever there was a phrase that took one of life’s great delights and reduced it to a brutal, utilitarian, joyless stump, it is that one.
And it’s everywhere. The success of the power nap. Computer-aided power naps. The science of sleep. Bludgeoning your brain into submission with binaural beats. How twenty minutes can make you into a productive whirlwind, rather than a person who wends wearily through the dog hours of the afternoon jump-starting their brain with a caffeine defibrillator.
Power naps. The choice of dynamic chief executives everywhere. The strictly controlled, time-limited preference of world leaders.
Exactly. Is that the company you want to keep? (If it is, it’s probably fair to point out that you may have come to the wrong blog).
So here’s a plea: don’t do it. Don’t power nap. Enjoy your sleep instead. Take a siesta. Be a cat: find a sunny spot, and laze in it for most of the afternoon, occasionally twitching your ears and once or twice making funny growling noises which don’t wake you up but which alarm the hell out of everyone around you. Sleep from after lunch until just before tea. Take two hundred and forty winks. Eat a big lunch, drink some nice wine, and sink into the soft skin of your sleepy lover. Hang your hammock, and rock the afternoon away.
Or do the best thing of all. Take your power nap. Set your alarm for twenty minutes. And when the alarm goes off, open one lazy eye, swat it away like the venomous pest it is, and relish the feeling of sinking back down, down, down…