I get asked that question.

I know the way I sleep, or used to. I remember all those early days when I was teaching all the time, staying up too late grading papers, by which I mean not really “grading” but commenting on, suggesting improvements, thinking about them, especially when the student didn’t, trying to do everything I could to make every single student as much better as I could, running my pen out of ink, pounding my typewriter to flames, until about 3:00 o’clock in the morning, I’d fall comatose, and the alarm would ring at 6:00 a.m. to start me on another day, and too much coffee to get me going so I could still tell jokes and not fall asleep in class while teaching, the students patiently waiting, no, never, I led a waking life and I saw the students progress, so my waking life was useful after all.

I’ve heard recently on the campaign trail, the voice exhorting people to do the necessary work – “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

And now, lately, for the past year or so, I’ve been sleeping in chunks. I set the alarm, but don’t really need to, because I’ve trained my body to wake me up as necessary. So I get up early, go down the hall to the bathroom, “take care of business,” and go back to bed and try to sleep. It takes me awhile, and sometimes the alarm rings while I’m still awake, and I don’t get that last blissful chunk of sleep.

Sometimes, while I’m still awake and not asleep yet, I’ll let my mind wander. It wanders a lot, and sometimes I can steer it or make suggestions to it. Sometimes I mutter to myself as if I were giving a lecture to an audience, myself, deciding if I entertained myself enough so I could try it out on other people where I could charge money and get a speaker’s fee. I always need money. And I have a lot to say, before I go on too long as I tend to do and bore even myself, which is an easy way to prepare for a lecture. And sometimes the alarm rings and I’m still talking to myself, (so please don’t call 911), and then I get up and write it all down. Hence another blog entry.

So if somebody asks, “How did you sleep?” I have a variety of answers. Of course, the old stand-by: “I don’t know, I was asleep at the time.” But now I can say, “In a bed,” or “In chunks.” That one seems the most likely.