Sleep Is Death Lite

There's no way to get around it: sleep is creepy. It's not something I talk about in mixed company (because I'm seemingly alone in my belief), but I've always felt this way. I remember being a kid and becoming slightly uncomfortable whenever they showed people in bed on Little House on the Prairie, preparing to turn themselves over to an eight-hour minicoma. I'm sorry, but the widely accepted ritual of climbing atop an elevated platform and assuming a state of insectlike dormancy is disturbing to me.

The fact that otherwise bright and energetic people willingly allow themselves to become drooling vegetables at the end of each day feels like a failure. We, as superior animals, should be above such base requirements by now. Every night I climb aboard my raised coma platform, I sigh with resignation, feeling like a monkey in pants.

Have you ever seen a person sleeping? We look like idiots. As I put a fresh pillowcase on my pillow, I see the stains there, created by excess saliva that rolled out of my mouth during my nightly transformation into a lobotomized fool, and I feel shame. This is no way to live, people.

In addition to all the time wasted to voluntary loss of consciousness, I worry that one of these days I'll get in too deep and won't be able to pull out the other side. Sleep is Death Lite, and playing chicken with the grim reaper is, I think, ill-advised. Yet we do it every day. So far I've won every contest, but the odds keep getting longer and longer. It's Russian roulette beneath a fluffy comforter. Tonight could very well be the night that I'm drawn to the light.

And the fact that sleep is not only accepted by society, but celebrated too-well, that concerns me. We should be working at correcting this abnormality. Instead, we build homes equipped with special rooms (chambers) in which to assume our freakish science fiction states of suspended animation, complete with fancy hand-carved hibernation stands. We also frequent places of business, like Bed, Bath and Beyond, where one can purchase myriad frilly, scented dormancy supplies. If we had a grotesque dangling mole on our faces, we'd have it removed, not drive across town to purchase an imported mole cozy.