First Year Focus

Sleeping with the Enemy?

Since I'm trying to eliminate some common misconceptions about college, heres a big one. Sleep is not the enemy. Sleep is your best friend.

I can't emphasize that point enough, having been here long enough to have learned the incredibly large value of catching some ZZZs. I'm writing this column after two consecutive nights of staying up until 5 a.m. But please, do as I say, not as I do!

I started off college thinking that sleeping was another fun activity, like bowling or surfing the Net, that people just do occasionally. I didn't realize that it's a lot more like eating - you have to do it to stay alive. Granted, it's pretty easy to get along without it for a while. I pulled my first all-nighter two weeks ago, and surprisingly, the paper I wrote while doing it earned the best grade I've had here. The next day, I felt a little incoherent, but definitely awake. I made it to (almost) all of my classes, and I started to consider how much I could get done with the extra 5 or 6 hours I would have each day if I never went to sleep at all.

Then it hit like a Mack truck. I was sitting at my desk working on my Calc homework the next afternoon, when suddenly the differential equations disappeared and I was surrounded by psychedelic, multicolored swirls. (Those were inspired by my screensaver.) Then I was floating across the ocean on a piece of cheese... when a friend came knocking on my door, he found me still sitting at my desk, twisted in the most awkward contortion possible so my head reached my pillow. I didn't get up again that night.

Now, some people may be able to handle all-nighters better than I. For instance, there are my friends down the hall who do it on a regular basis "for fun." They don't study - they play pool instead. These are the same people who went to a rave last night from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. (and invited me to go, insisting that they'd be back by noon!) But they pay for it in their own ways. Take my friend Shamim, one of the rave boys. In return for staying up all night, he went to bed at 8 o'clock one Friday. He didn't wake up until 6 p.m. on Saturday. And just the other day, he was sitting on my friend Nathalie's bed. She left for a minute to go get water, and when she came back, he was practically passed out, and didn't wake up until five hours later.

You see, your body will make you sleep, even at the most inopportune times. So you might as well just do it when you're supposed to. Last night, my friend Simon had a p-frosh (prospective freshman) staying in his room. Imagine how surprised Simon and I were when we left the room for a minute and came back at 3 a.m. to find his p-frosh already in bed! But he was a smart little guy who apparently knew more than we "college kids" did. How do I know this? Because he probably feels alive this morning, and I'm still wishing for the comfort of my sheets.

One possible solution to that grogginess would be caffeine. But you can only drink so many cups of coffee (my limit is about ten) before you get sick of the taste. And try as you might, you won't find any caffeine pills on campus. Believe me, I've looked. But Duke is smarter than that. They make you walk all the way down the street to get Vivarin, and if you're that badly in need of caffeine, you probably won't be able to make it down the street without stopping in your tracks and falling asleep on the sidewalk.

So there's pretty much no way around it - sleep is a necessity. Ask my friends who have crashed on my floor. Or the ones like Shamim who have missed entire days because they needed a rest. Or me, with my habit of going to be bed at 5 a.m.

No, on second thought, don't bother asking me. I'll be asleep.