I've been thinking about this for awhile and I wanted to float a theory out there to my small number of listeners. Actually, I'm just going to present it to those of you who will support me on it. That cuts down my audience to about a quarter. Here's the theory: Sleep is a drug and it should be made illegal. Before you stop reading this and tell everyone what an idiot I am, hear me out. Let's go step by step on how I came to this conclusion.

1. If you try not to sleep, you'll have some serious side effects: Grumpiness, irratibility, and I have heard that in extreme circumstances where sleep has not been had for days that you can have psychotic episodes. Now in the drug world, when you stop taking a drug and have side effects, we call that withdrawal.

2. Just like any other drug, you should not operate heavy machinery while you are asleep. If you don't agree with my overall theory on that point alone then I just don't know what will convince you.

3. On drugs, you can overdose and it can cause death or at least a trip to the hospital. Because we have been on sleep our entire lives our tolerance to it is pretty high so it is pretty hard to overdose. However, if you get too much sleep you can feel pretty crappy. This is just a precursor to a sleep OD. If you were able to actually overdose then there would be no saving you.

4. It almost seems elementary to mention this, but I feel like I have to spell it all out sometime. More for my benefit than for yours. At two o'clock in the morning you will do just about anything to get your sleep (and your drugs).

I think those four points pretty soundly sum up my arguments. With this evidence, I am urging congress to pass a bill that makes sleep illegal. It's for the good of the nation. Just think, if we kick the sleep habit we will get so much more accomplished. The nation's productivity will skyrocket as we surpass those nations who still have their little crutch of sleep. Join the movement and write your congressman today!

Ok, now that I have expressed my feelings about sleep in general, I do have a couple of stories related to sleep that I'll put up here, just so the column doesn't stop that short. Plus they are in theme which is a huge thing for me.


Insomniac

When I was going to college I had some pretty big sleep issues. I would not be able to get to sleep until about 7 in the morning. I would really try to get to sleep too. So I would finally fall asleep at 7, then sleep all through the day and miss my classes. I decided that I needed to just stay up through the day when I couldn't get to sleep like that. The problem was that when I tried to do that I would sometimes fall asleep in classes or halfway through the day. Someone suggested that I try Mini Thins to stay awake during the day.

If you don't know what Mini Thins are, they are basically diet pills that contain ephedrine. I didn't know at that time either. This is important because I was a sophomore in college and had yet to crack 110 pounds. This wasn't because I was overly concerned with maintaining my girlish figure, it was simply that I didn't put on weight. So taking off weight was not number one on my list, but I ignorantly took the pills anyway.

I had classic sleep withdrawal symptoms, or maybe they were mini thin symptoms I can't really tell the difference. It's enough to say that my hands were shaking and I felt all around worse than I had when I was going to sleep at 7, so I missed my classes that semester and the next semester I scheduled all night classes.


Sleep Manipulation

I think most people know the feeling when you have just woken up from deep slumber and someone asks you something or asks you to do something. The results are unpredictable. It's even worse if you are sleep deprived and that happens. I can count several occasions where I have lied, play acted, ignored and chopped salmon for fun and profit because of this. Maybe not the last one. On the others, however, I can truly blame the sleep. I had no control over the lying, ignoring or play acting, it was completely the sleep. Here's a couple of examples:

When I was in college I would sometimes stay with a girlfriend, who it is doesn't really matter. Right as I had just fallen asleep she would ask something like, "Did you get everything done for your project?" Ok, everyone say awww now becasue someone cared about me. My answer would always be, "Yeah" though ninety-nine percent of the time the answer was really no. I didn't care about the project, I was tucked away in dream land having sex with nine beautiful women.

My wife recently had a baby and we have been sleep deprived ever since. Some of the things I have done since then include: holding my arms and acting like I am holding a baby when she asked me to get the baby, pulling out all of the necessary implements to change a diaper when there was no need to change a diaper, hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock when the phone rings, and so much more. The only reason I remember any of it is because Kristen relayed it to me at a time when I was more awake.


So you can see that sleep is a dangerous and addictive drug. There is none worse due to the fact that the human race has generations upon generations of built up tolerance to it. You can try to stop sleeping on your own, but I'm afraid that until they make a nicorette for sleep we won't have much luck.