Asleep in Europe

Sleeping has always been a problem for me. Not napping. I’m a wizard at napping, as I have reported before in this column. But sleeping. Like in my own bed. Like for six to eight hours. I’m just not very good at it. Never was.

No one sleeps better on a bus or train than I do. While on our recent trip, the second I got in the seat, I was unconscious. But why? There is nothing on a bus that lends itself to nodding off. The seats are uncomfortable, the space is cramped and it’s usually hot. True, one of our tour guides was listing the emperors of Rome in both alphabetical and chronological order, but I don’t think that was the problem, although I was snoring by the time she got to Caligula.

Yes, I slept through most of the countries that take Euros. In fact, some of my mass transit sleeping this trip rivaled brown bear hibernation in Alaska. My wife and son learned  great deal about the habits of these giant omnivores from our tour guide a few years back,  but I’m pretty clueless because I slept through most of the Pacific Northwest.

When I returned from our vacation, I decided that I would simulate the very same conditions on a bus that usually sent me to never-never land. First, I asked my wife to talk to me like a tour guide. Drone on about how the Greeks built the Acropolis and how the Romans constructed the Coliseum. That had worked beautifully just two weeks earlier. I think Mary Ellen felt kind of dumb reading “Rome for Dummies” out loud to me from the foot of the bed, but she did it. But then I asked her to shake the bed back and forth so I’d feel like I was on the bus. That made her drowsy, so she snuck out of the room and fell asleep on the couch.

It clearly wasn’t the tour guide rap that made me sleepy. I took a hard-back metal bridge chair and sat straight up in it, bounced up and down like I was on a bus and looked sideways out my bedroom window. But I was still wide awake after 10 minutes. Maybe it was the sun that made me drowsy? I shined a floor lamp directly in my eyes and started bouncing up and down again. (I think my neighbor, Norm, could see into my bedroom from his living room window, which might explain why he kept winking at me the next day when we played tennis.) No luck. Still wide awake. Then I had another idea, but my wife wasn’t thrilled with the concept.

“No, Dick. You cannot invite 30 strangers over to the house to sit around you and talk when you sleep.”

Then it hit me. The bus trips are during the day, but I’m trying to sleep at night. So the next day, I got back into my chair at nigh noon, sat straight up, looking out my bedroom window.  The scenery wasn’t changing so I started moving the chair from one window to the next. The sun was pouring in on my face. Suddenly I felt myself getting sleepy…very sleepy.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

It worked. I slept from noon until 8 p.m., sitting straight up in the chair, leaning against my bedroom window. My insomnia was cured.

Two hours later, it was time for bed. I got under the covers and just couldn’t fall asleep.

The next morning I was still wide awake, but here was the good news. I’d be ready for a nap in just a few hours.