Unplanned mid-day naps are amazing. I hate them.

Adulthood presents us all with the existential choice between naps or a cocaine addiction. Those who tend to be Type-A go-getters would say snoozecels keep seething while awakechads refuse to be tiredpilled. But I have a lot going on in a day, multiple account managers breathing down my neck and two-day turnarounds on entire full-funnel campaign mockups because apparently no one knows how to tell the client “no,” and all these pants-on-fire emergencies eventually trigger a paroxysm of anxiety and rage inside my brain. In every way, around 2:30 PM, I am on the verge of the abyss. There are simply not enough hours in the day, and that doesn’t even account for the ambient social rot and political atrophy or a version of capitalism that is declining from merely dehumanizing to actively anti-human. I’m tired and worn out, so to retain some semblance of humanity and inspiration through all this quotidian chaos, I have started taking accidental on-top-of-the-sheets fully-clothed mid-afternoon naps.

These are your body’s last resort to find a grasping source of energy, and they will always happen when you least expect them. Sometimes, the dreams are way too realistic; when she appears, I’ll jerk awake, briefly grimace, and return to reality with a somewhat resolved headache and cleared sinuses and a strange, sudden craving for a cigarette.

Interested? All you have to do is:

STEP 1: Plan on getting through your daily to-do list.
STEP 2: Tell yourself you’re just going to lie down for a few minutes.
STEP 3: Enter a catastrophically deep REM cycle between space and time.
STEP 4: Wake up three hours later.

This won’t help you solve any of your sleep-related problems. You’ll be tired and rested at the same time. Night will be morning. You’ll have chills and be sweating. You won’t be able to fall asleep until 3 AM. It’s very disorienting to doze off while it’s still light out and then wake up after dark. Your brain will feel like an omelet, and you’ll immediately be flooded with the You’ve made a terrible mistake and now you’re going to die, you’ve irrevocably fucked it chemicals. It’s that weird feeling when you wake up all fuzzy and foggy, then you look out a window and can’t tell what time of day it is and you have no idea if you’ve been asleep 10 minutes or 14 hours. I don’t know the word to describe this sensation, but I’d like to bottle and consume it.

Accidental on-top-of-the-sheets fully-clothed mid-day naps are also great on bare floors, especially when the floor-level air is colder than the rest of the room’s air.

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