2024
I’ve been making a habit this year of following the fleeting strangeness of my thoughts down their winding paths. When an odd question or observation surfaces, instead of brushing it aside, I’ve been letting myself explore it fully – turning it over, examining its edges, seeing where it leads. This practice has turned into an unexpected series of bloggerly meditations, each one revealing something I hadn’t anticipated when I first began picking at the thread.
Today’s contemplation springs from a rather mundane source: my head is pounding, a dull ache that makes the glare of my laptop screen feel like a personal affront. The logical solution seems obvious: take a nap. Step away from my desk, find a quiet corner, and let consciousness slip away for just a little while. Such a simple fix, in theory.
Yet I find myself resistant, and not for the usual practical reasons – the fear of oversleeping, the worry about nighttime insomnia, or the guilt of stepping away from work. My hesitation runs deeper, rooted in a peculiar existential anxiety that has haunted my relationship with daytime sleep since childhood. In truth, I have not had a nap since September of 2014, in a tiny bedroom in our Reykjavík lodgings, after a full day of air travel.
This resistance to naps has always marked me as the odd one out in my family. Both my sisters, my late mother, and my late grandmother were all devoted practitioners of the afternoon nap. They could – and still can, in my sisters’ case – drift off contentedly at any hour, emerging refreshed and bewildered by my inability to do the same. “Are you sure we’re related?” they tease when I remind them of my napping aversion.
While nighttime sleep feels like a natural rhythm, a universal pause in the world’s turning, afternoon naps have always felt like acts of rebellion against the very fabric of social reality. Waking from a nap would leave me profoundly discombobulated, grappling with questions that went far beyond the usual sleep inertia. These brief glimpses into an alternate reality – where our carefully constructed routines dissolve – leave me wrestling with what philosopher Martin Heidegger called “thrown-ness”: that unsettling awareness that we’re thrown into existence with all these structures and routines that can suddenly feel arbitrary when disrupted. If we can simply check out of our structured reality for an unauthorized break in consciousness, what does that say about the structures themselves?
It makes sense, in a way. I’ve always been motivated by ritual, routine, and an almost visceral need to avoid “getting into trouble.” Since childhood, the prospect of breaking rules – even unspoken ones – has been enough to keep me rigidly in line. Regular sleep feels sanctioned, a shared agreement we all participate in. But naps? Naps feel like temporary anarchism, little ruptures in the social contract. Each time I’ve emerged from one, I’ve found myself questioning everything: Why do we partition time the way we do? What makes these hours “working hours” and those hours “sleeping hours”? The arbitrary nature of it all becomes suddenly, uncomfortably apparent.
So here I am with my headache, contemplating the strange choice between physical discomfort and existential disorientation. There’s something telling in the fact that I’d rather push through pain than face the void of afternoon sleep – that space where the careful constructs of daily life reveal themselves as exactly what they are: constructs.
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe a nap is just a glorious midday escape, as my sisters would surely tell me. But what if there’s an opportunity here, buried beneath my resistance? What if I approached this age-old family divide not as a quirk to be overcome but as a window into something deeper? Perhaps in examining why I find such profound discomfort in these sanctioned moments of chaos, I might discover something about the nature of order itself – and my relationship to it.
What would happen if I treated each nap as a kind of meditation on structure and chaos? I could keep a journal of the thoughts that surface in those disorienting moments between sleep and wakefulness. Why do certain types of rest feel “legitimate” while others feel transgressive? What makes me guard so fiercely these artificial boundaries between day and night, work and rest? There’s something about voluntary unconsciousness in the middle of the day that still feels like a small betrayal of the orderly world I’ve constructed.
Maybe in deliberately crossing these self-imposed boundaries, I’d find they’re more flexible than I imagined. Or perhaps I’d discover that my resistance isn’t about rule-breaking at all, but about a deeper need to remain tethered to the waking world, even when it hurts.
As someone who delights in recalling and recounting my dreams, what different flotsam might rattle around in my brain during these contested hours? While my nighttime dreams unfold in their sanctioned space, what unique consciousness might emerge in these guerrilla afternoon sessions? It’s like having access to two different dream laboratories: the official nighttime one where the subconscious is allowed to roam free, and this rebellious afternoon version, where different rules might apply. What revelations await in these unauthorized territories of rest?
I touch my tender, throbbing temple and wonder: what might I learn by finally letting myself drift away in the forbidden afternoon light?
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