Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

We're reading and hearing a lot about sleep deprivation these days.

It seems a lot of people suffer from this problem, some to greater degrees than others. indeed, it's been mentioned as a possible contributing factor to last week's tragic and untimely death of actor Heath Ledger.

Now I don't profess to be an expert on sleep issues, so please don' cite anything you read here as being authoritative. I'm just one of several billion people in this world who try to sleep a lot, sometimes with more success than others.

It's been many years that I have found I have been able to operate with relatively little sleep, compared, say, to my wife. She generally retires for the night earlier than I, and on mornings when neither of us have to get up (weekends, holidays, etc.), I invariably am up and going a good hour ahead of her. That's one of the things about me that I think surprises my wife.

There have been plenty of times that work demands have kept me awake until well after midnight, with the knowledge that I had to be up at 5 in the morning. And I'm usually able to rise (pun fully intended) to the occasion.

"I don't know how you do it," a very sleepy Beth sometimes mutters as I tiptoe about the house, trying to get my self dressed and ready without waking her (I seldom succeed, but I do try - Honest!).

I don't know how I get by on so little sleep either, but I somehow accomplish it, and perhaps there are just some things in life that were never meant to be explained.

It wasn't always that way with me.

As a kid, I had a terrible time getting up in the morning, and was usually grumpy as hell when I was finally able to make myself vertical. My parents, (father especially) used to tease me mercilessly over that, creating a collection of not-so happy memories. That's especially the case when I reflect that my dad was no load of laughs when he was tired.

Like most kids, I liked staying up late, and I think I was like most kids when dreaded getting up. But there are certain things one has to do, so you do them.

I've heard it said that the need for extra sleep is part of the developing process as one passes from youth to adulthood, so my inability to be pleasant first thing in the morning was possibly more biological than anything else (again, I'm no expert). Besides, there are some people (such as those who have had the pleasure of working with me) who might argue that I'm a fulltime grump, no matter how much sleep I've had.

It's not easy being me.

And my troubles getting up in the morning persisted until well after I could claim youth as an excuse.

I waited tables for a couple of years, working nights, getting home at about 1 a.m., maybe watching TV and unwinding until about 2, and sleeping until noon. It was a great life, but probably not too healthy, and certainly not very productive.

But even well into my 30s, I had trouble with oversleeping. By this point, my mother and father were not there to make sure I got up. Indeed, knowing the hours I was keeping once I got into this line of work, they often encouraged me to sleep in if I could, even mornings when I had to get to work.

I found a very surprising remedy to cure my oversleeping. I stopped using an alarm clock.

I discovered this sort of by accident. not long after my father died (I was 34 at the time), I found I was waking up in the middle of the night a lot. In an effort to find some diversion that was not too upsetting, I turned my clock-radio on to get some music, setting it to go off on its own after an hour. The complication was if I had the unit set to play the radio, it's the radio that would come on in the morning, not the alarm. No matter, if it would help with the immediate problem, I figured it was worth going for. Besides, this was before I was married. I was living alone, so there was no one to bother but me.

Not only did it help me get back to sleep in the middle of the night, I found the gentle awakening of music, that was just loud enough to be heard, without being startling, was actually rather pleasant to wake up to. Being gently pulled out of a sound sleep was easier to deal with than being jolted awake.

So for many years, I was able to get up at just about any time I chose, with very little difficulty. Even staying up late at night (and there were some very late evenings in my pre-Beth days) presented relatively few problems.

Beth, on the other hand, uses an alarm clock, but it's maybe one morning 10 when that strange tone it makes (I don't know how to describe it) actually wakes me up. I'm usually lying there, already awake, waiting for it to go off.

The problem now, which I already alluded, is staying asleep all night.

There are times when work issues keep running through my mind, either things that have already happened that I can't get out of my head, or trying to work through problems that I know are going to crop up. even the sleep, when it comes, can be a restless. There have been a couple of mornings when I've risen after a night of tossing and turned, when beth has given me a knowing look and said, "You worked all night, didn't you!"

And while I seldom have trouble getting to sleep when my head and pillow meet, there are many occasions when I wake up in the middle in the middle of the night and just lie there for an hour or so. there's nothing upsetting me at times like that. I'm just not sleeping. and when the alarm goes off, I'm up and going.

Maybe I just piled up enough sleep when I was younger to see me through. Actually, I don't think that really makes a lot of sense, but for the moment, it's the best explanation I have. I'll see if I can come up with something better.

Let me sleep on it.