Caught Napping - October, 2007

There is nothing like a good nap.

How do I define good? Well, it isn’t about quantity. A good nap can be a 20-minute snooze under the right circumstances. A good nap should be serendipitous, where you find yourself drifting off and you enjoy the ride. You don’t plan a good nap, you just let it happen.

A good nap, like real estate, is about location, location, location. It shouldn’t be in bed, which is where you sleep – or, like many of us, try to sleep, get up, hit the bathroom, try to fall back to sleep and end up with CNN playing in the background (which I have come to realize is better as white noise than trying to lull myself back to sleep by watching infomercials; somehow my judgment at 4 AM is also asleep and I end up buying the 100 greatest soul songs of all time or some can opener than doesn’t work). Personally, I prefer the recliner, though I will occasionally doze on the couch, love seat or a favorite chair, but the recliner is my nap location of choice.

A good nap is where it is quiet and you aren’t interrupted. A good nap is when you don’t even move, where, sometimes the only thing that gets you up is when someone else suddenly appears in the room, when the other team scores a touchdown, or when the credits roll on the movie you were dying to watch and have now completely missed. Sometimes I wake up from a good nap because I am either freezing – all the more reason to always have that throw blanket handy, just in case – or I have to go to the bathroom so badly that my body starts screaming at me.

You might even consider it a good nap when you actually don’t want to fall asleep. When my nephew was younger, I’d offer to take him to the movies, knowing any Disneyesque, animated 90-minute commercial would probably result in a good nap for me. I once fell asleep at the movies before the opening credits (it was “The Aviator,” and I later missed most of Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Katherine Hepburn, but it was a good snooze, and that’s what counts). I don’t recommend a nap during movies with subtitles. Usually you can hear what is going on even with your eyes closed, but that does make reading the subtitles just a tad tougher. I fell asleep during “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and I had to read about the movie to learn that there were three protagonists (and to find out what on earth that movie was about). But in all of these cases, the naps were refreshing little tidbits.

There are bad naps, when you are someplace where you need to stay awake – such as when you are driving, for example – and you just can’t stop your eyes from first crossing and then closing. This generally happens when you are sitting in front of the room at a meeting, a lecture or a class and is reason enough to avoid sitting in the front row. If you can’t stay awake, at least you can feign interest and combat your drooping eyelids out of the speaker’s line of sight. You drink water or another beverage, fiddle with your pen, nod as if you are hanging on the speaker’s every stimulating syllable and try not to nod off.

Now that I am retired, spending more time at home and even sleeping longer at night, I nonetheless find myself taking more naps. It’s not that I am taking them (the implication being that they are planned), but that I find myself nodding off. I can feel them coming on halfway through one of my favorite shows on HGTV and I succumb. In fact, I welcome these little respites, and I am proud of myself for getting more rest after so many years of getting so little. Naps are a little slice of heaven to me, and I wake up not feeling guilty about not doing what I was supposed to be doing because I don’t have that guilt anymore. That’s what a good nap is all about.

Hey, are you starting to nod off while reading this? OK, then, have a good nap.