Sleep

Sleep is a giant waste of time. No two ways about it. If you're like me, you need at least four hours a night, with twice that once a week. Four hours is four pages of heavily-edited essay. Four hours is time for an oil change, a long email, learning a song on guitar, starting a novel, and writing a poem. Four hours is a precious handful of seconds - tiny little grains of time that slip through fingers like sand.

Do you cut back on sleep to squeeze something extra into most days? Me too. After a while, it's pretty hard to relax and turn off your brain. I spend my pre-sleep hour thinking about life, how I'm going to find time to write in the near future, life, work, books, life, cutting back on sleep, whether or not thinking about sleeping makes it hard to fall asleep, whether or not thinking about not thinking about sleep counts as thinking about sleep, and life. It's not exactly insomnia, but I envy people who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

My friend, on the other hand, once told me that he just "stops thinking about stuff" and goes to sleep. Is this a common thing? How is it even possible to voluntarily stop thinking?

If it is, I would like to learn how to turn off my brain at will. That would be grand. I know I said earlier that four hours of sleep is a waste of time, and I stand by that, but if I'm going to waste time, I'm darn well going to waste it sleeping, and not staring at the ceiling listening to random creaking and snoring sounds.

On a somewhat relevant note, dryers and washing machines are the best.