Sleeping is overrated for sharks and some people

Contra Costa Times

JUST HOW MANY HOURS are we required to sleep at night? With the possible exception of sharks, which need to move constantly so as not to sink, most living creatures require a certain amount of sleep.

I expect it would be quite a scandal in the shark community if it became known that one of them drowned because it was snoozing on the job. That's why image-conscious shark families continue to drive one another on -- swimming most of the time, night and day.

One can imagine the incredible amount of calories necessary to maintain the vigorous physical condition of this gigantic, ravenous predator. I wonder what the fuss is about in the developing of potent shark repellents. Next time you venture into shark-infested waters, it might be a good idea to take along one or two super-sized bottles of industrial-strength sleeping pills and then, very inconspicuously, let them get a glimpse of the objectionable drug every once in a while.

Knowing that they can ill afford to take any time off for sleep, the beasts will naturally avoid you. While you're doing this, it might be prudent to place your calorie-rich physique inside a steel cage, just in case the sharks aren't familiar with sleeping pill commercials.

Aside from sharks, the only other living thing that I'm aware of that goes without sleep is my wife. While I definitely need my six to eight hours --mostly leaning toward the eight-hour period -- as recommended by alert sleep experts, my wife always seems to be awake.

Something usually happens to wake me up at 2 or 3 in the wee hours of the night and -- voila -- I find her reading a novel. More than likely, it's something like Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," a gigantic tome of a book, which she might have inadvertently dropped on my head while plowing through the exciting parts containing descriptions of war.
My advice that she should concentrate more on the "peace" sections, in the hopes that more soothing pages might put her to sleep, goes largely unheard. As I frantically look for headache medicine and then immediately doze off again, she roams through the house for the rest of the night like a ghost, haunting the visitors of a medieval castle in a B-rated horror movie.

Then in the morning, looking completely refreshed, she goes to work. There she continues to read, not novels but briefs, which to my surprise have nothing to do with underwear labels but are legal papers filled with a foreign language called lawyerese.

I go on with my daily routine as well, which mostly involves activities like bumping into walls due to lack of sleep. Lucky for me, another potent drug is available to keep me from dozing off right after getting out of bed, and this comes in the form of a hot black liquid called coffee. My wife doesn't drink coffee because, she says, it keeps her awake all night. Oh, really?

Maybe for me it works the other way around because quite often, coffee doesn't seem to keep me alert during the day. I can usually tell that coffee was sleeping on duty again when I suddenly perk up in front of my laptop and realize that I have written multiple pages, but the screen is filled with an incomprehensible language -- page after page full of such inexplicable sentence fragments as "tyutyut."

At first, I assumed it was a mysterious code -- perhaps extraterrestrial beings were trying to contact me. Or ghosts, haunting my house, were trying to tell me to get out because they have trouble sleeping, with me tossing and turning all night. Unfortunately, I usually find that the letters signify nothing otherworldly but instead indicate the exact spot where my nose hit the keyboard when I dozed off.

Perhaps I should take a page from sharks and go for a midnight swim, an activity which would result in a ravenous appetite. Then, unable to sleep on a full stomach, I could, along with my wife, haunt our haunts all night and maybe hunt down ghosts and extraterrestrials as fodder for my writing.