Sleep is very mysterious. Even without the intervention of caffeine or alcohol or other known causes of interference, it behaves in my life like a red needle that always seems to indicate something, even if it's not clear exactly what.

Like most people, I treated going to bed as a trial when I was little. My parents had a system for bedtimes that allowed us to pick certain nights when we could stay up a little later than other nights, but we had to parcel them out over the week. I think it was supposed to be a lesson in making choices, just like the way we used to have a certain amount of allowance that was generally available and a certain amount that we received in "certificates" that could only be cashed in for serious things -- primarily clothes -- that we could pick out ourselves within whatever budget was available. (My parents were very creative.) I can remember a time when I had to go to bed at 8:00 as a general rule, but twice a week, I could stay up until 8:30 -- the days were up to me. I generally picked Tuesday as one of my 8:30 nights, because that was when Happy Days was on. Going to bed was a drag, not to put too fine a point on it.

Also like most people, by the time I got to high school, I had a harder and harder time dragging myself out of bed in the morning. I remember doing the thing where the alarm clock was across the room and I had to get up to turn it off, although I would sometimes get out of bed and hit the button without really waking up, at which point I would find myself bolting out of bed an hour later with no recollection of the alarm going off. It was very disconcerting, although I grew in time to appreciate the weirdness of walking around without waking up. Come to think of it, it's not a bad metaphor for what much of high school was like anyway.

It was only after I got older that it started to become sort of mystical, in the sense that I would go through phases where I slept late or stayed up late or woke up a lot in the middle of the night. I have strange memories of particular nights, including one that was full of extremely loud and aggressive thunderstorms, when I kept waking up every hour or so and being half-aware of lights and noise. I somehow went through the next day with an extremely unsettling feeling like I had been scared all night long, although I know enough not to actually think a thunderstorm outside is going to come in the window and hurt me.

I have mixed luck with naps. Sometimes I can doze off and wake up half an hour later feeling like I just slept for three days, but sometimes I wake up disoriented and can't get my rhythms readjusted for the rest of the day -- it feels like morning instead of evening; I can't tell if I'm hungry or not; I can't sense when I should sleep again. Sometimes it's like rebooting my brain in a very good way, and sometimes it's nothing but chaos.

Unfortunately, my job requires the occasional all-nighter, and I've really gotten too old for it. When I don't get sleep all night long and wind up sitting at a conference table in the morning trying to double-check a 100-page document for math or formatting errors, it's like swimming in syrup. I stare at it, I read the same line five times, and I can't get the wheels to turn. I once had to work pretty much nonstop from 7:00 one morning until 4:00 the following afternoon, and I have rarely felt anything more unpleasant than the feeling of going home at 4:00, lying down, and realizing that as badly as I wanted and needed to sleep, the four hundred cups of coffee I had had in the preceding twelve hours to prevent me from passing out with my head on my desk were going to stay right there with me, on duty long after I had told them they were dismissed. They let me go eventually, but it probably took an hour, and lying in bed with my eyes closed feeling that tired and not falling asleep was enough to drive me to tears.

Starting in the fall of 2001, I went through a period where I slept in the living room -- a phenomenon I still cannot explain, but am glad is over. It technically started in the post-9/11 days, when I would watch TV with great trepidation, sort of afraid to really fall asleep in case something bad happened. But for some reason, even after the grip of that loosened somewhat, I didn't go back to bed. I was spending a lot of time hanging out at my parents' house at that time, and I would just stay up watching the Game Show Network or something ridiculous like that until I was tired enough to sleep, at which point I'd flip off the TV, lean back in the recliner, and sleep until morning. When I was at home, it was the living room couch. I had perfectly good beds this entire time; I just didn't want to sleep in them. And I slept fine, too -- right number of hours, felt refreshed . . . everything you're looking for from sleep except a sense that you're not a nutball for sleeping in the living room. It ended when I moved in September of 2002 -- somehow with the fresh start of the new place, things returned to normal.

And then over the last few weeks, a new mystery -- going to sleep fine, and then waking up early and not being able to get back to sleep. I'm a naturally early riser -- even on weekends, it's not unusual for me to wake up between 6:00 and 7:00. I like having long mornings. It's peaceful, it gives me time to think, and provided I haven't been out late the night before, it stretches out the weekend days and seems to provide the gift of additional free time. But when it moved back to 5:30 or so, I started to roll my eyes. I do not need to be up at 5:30. And then it started to move backwards. (Yes, yes, just like the Stephen King book.) Twice last week, I was awake at 4:30 in the morning with what I knew very well to be zero chance of going back to sleep. Why? Don't know. It left me zombie-like by afternoon, struggling not to fall asleep at work, but then unable to fall asleep if I tried to take naps when I got home. There is nothing more aggravating than trying to make yourself fall asleep, and even though I had cut the coffee and things of that sort, I was in some kind of a weird spin that, once it starts, is very hard to get out of.

And then it let go. Slept in over the weekend, took a couple of naps, and now all is well again. I can't really explain it; again, sleep is very mysterious to me. It's been a highly eventful spring and summer -- neither good nor bad, really, just lots of things. Lots of thinking, lots of trying to make decisions about this and that, lots of things changing. As I said, it always looks to me like a red needle -- when it moves, it's enough for me to look at and say "hmm," and then I shrug and put up with early morning reruns of Wings until it's over. I could be more analytical at those times, I suppose, but I'm usually really tired.