My sweet-spot for napping is ten to fifteen minutes – anything beyond that and I am groggy and unpleasant and disoriented for the remainder of the day. Yesterday I laid down for a second and woke up two hours later, completely unsure of the day, time, or year. It wrecked me for hours, and rather than feeling renewed or refreshed, I felt completely devoid of energy or ambition, and any plans I had had for the rest of the day went by the wayside, replaced by some aimless wandering, unnecessary eating, and general discontentment. It reminded me why I don’t usually nap during the day – there’s always the risk of going too long. The disco naps of my youth, usually fitful exercises in forced futility, should have been enough of a lesson. Now when there is no disco to be had, there is even less of a reason for a nap.
There is something about the resulting haze, however, that sparks creative rumination. Could we perhaps capture this space between sleep and wakefulness, and use it for some story or pictorial narrative? It feels like a dreamworld, nothing quite real or sure, with room for fanciful imaginings or outright illusions. That tricky in-between space is what has always intrigued me: the borders, the doorways, the corridors that lead from one realm to another. The pocket of time and space that bridges the conscious waking world and the unconscious sleeping world is not unlike the midnight hour – a crux of good and evil, light and dark, life and death.
All of this from a nap that went on a little too long.
