One Third of Our Lives

We spend roughly one-third of our life asleep as a biological imperative. My relationship with sleep kind of tells my life story, not in dreams but in the pure mechanics of when I went to bed and when I got up. Oddly, sleep has seldom been a neutral element in my life. It's been something that either prevented me from doing something or enabled me. I had a bedtime enforced by the adults in my life until about a month before I went into the Army. Kids in my house went to bed when they were told. Whether they went to sleep or not was up to them. I argued against it for years but it never did any good. The only time I stayed up past 9:00 on a school night was if I had neglected to do a chore. My old man pulled me out of bed one night about 11:00 because we were out of firewood. We heated the house with a wood stove, and my negligence caused a crisis I had to fix by myself on a frigid January night. Never happened again. I was a farm kid in high school. Summers and winter work days always…