Sleep.

I love sleep, and I think I always have. I'm one of those nine hour a night sleepers, those creative dreamers who need more sleep than average to recharge our batteries and work on problems free of the bounds of a conscious mind. Medically lack of sleep results in irritability, stubborness, lack of creativity, poorer memory, depression and reduced motivation. Since I already am irritable, stubborn, prone to depressiona nd lazy, you can see why sleep might be important to me.
But I actively enjoy sleeping. I get the same feeling when waking up from a good night sleep a I get from a good hike, or a great book, or a fine movie. I get a feeling of satisfaction and warmth from a truly enlivening experience. Sleep is enjoyable, even though I may not be concsciously noticing the fact at the time.
The trouble is, I'm not a good sleeper. I need a quiet place free from distractions to sleep. I can't worry about something, have had caffeine recently, or sleep with a tv on in the next room. I need legitimate quiet, not a reduced level of volume. I need my sleep to be continuous, a stretch of nine hours in which to get my quota of REM sleep. Four hours, an interruption and five more hours doesn't work, as I'll spend an hour at the beginning of each section trying to get to sleep. This hasn't been a big problem most of my life. I just have a quiet bedroom and lock myself away.
But, I'm married. I'm married to someone who can literally go from a lucid answering of a question to snoring in five seconds. That's not an exaggeration, I've timed it. I'm married to someone who functions just fine on seven hours of sleep a day. I'm married to someone who can wake up, do something and be asleep again in five minutes. So, typically Christina stays up to eleven of the clock, heads to bed and is asleep by 11:15, wakes up at 6 am basically refreshed and off to work. At the moment I am deeply and ridiculously jealous of this ability.
There's no point in me going to bed before my wife, she will simply wake me up when she comes to bed. There's no location in the house where I won't be woken up by her morning routine. it used to be that I went to work two hours later than she did, and I could sleep in after she left, approximating a real night's sleep. But now we have Larry.
Larry has all the atrributes in sleeping I don't have. He can fall asleep quickly, he sleeps for only three hours at a time, he can transition from sleep to activity to sleep again at incredible speeds, and he likes to get up at dawn.
It's been two full weeks since I had a full night of sleep. I have all the time in the world to sleep, just as long as it isn't for more than six hours at a time at night, and two hours at a time during the day.
But I have a dream. I dream of a day that will come soon, when I too will be able to dream uninterrupted.
Have a great night's sleep tonight. If you do, your day after will be that much better.