Naptaking is not usually deliberate because when it happens, there's simply no telling when one is going to wake up. When I fall asleep, I sleep so deeply that it takes me two alarm clocks just to stir me in the mornings. When at last I am induced to open my eyes, I need further inducement to get up at all, and not lie back down again 30 seconds later. I have my world calculated with precision to just how much time I need to get dressed for work at Chick-fil-a, how much time I need to get dressed for school, and how much time I need to get dressed for church, though I still haven't wrapped my sleepy head around the amount of time that it takes to get to church from my new location. A nap, such a simple thing, could easily turn into a catastrophe.
There was a time when the concept of a nap was laughable, and how I laughed at those silly other people who would sit down after a long meal, not move for the better part of half an hour and then suddenly begin to shift about blearily, trying to catch up on what they missed without admitting that they missed anything. The day that I accidentally fell asleep clinging to Lynn's inflatable mattress during the Ireland trip (actually, it was a floaty pool mattress of DOOM, but we were all too kind to tell her so) was a rare and shocking event. The onslaught of college and its terrible toll on one's internal clock took care of the shock value.
Now I find that if I'm not careful, and I sit down without some degree of caution, the sandman will snipe me from the rafters. Usually I know nothing about it until I wake up some two or three hours later and wonder why on earth attaching a squid to my handbag to carry my keys seemed like such a good idea ten minutes earlier. Just as well because it turns out that the object that I thought was a squid was only a discarded sweater.
My dog encourages this phenomenon as often as possible. I think he likes standing sentry over me while I sleep (see October entry regarding scent). He is a very small dachshund and he enjoys being cuddled and receiving attention as often as he can manage to get it. He's also fun to tease.
I sleep on a bunk bed, usually the top bunk, though occasionally I'll fall asleep reading and wake up a while later on the bottom bunk, too lazy to make any geographical changes. The dog prefers the bottom bunk because he has some difficulty with heights, but he shoves aside such apprehensions for my sake. He's also afraid of the dark and of dogs who look like they might be big enough to challenge his status as the alpha of a one-dog pack.
He greeted me with much enthusiasm when I got home from grocery shopping today. He doesn't like that I lock him in his crate/den when I leave the house, but after coming home from work many, many times to discover that he'd overturned the hamper so that he could commune with my clothes, and while he was at it he'd strewn the contents of the dust bin around the room presumably for the hell of it because half the time there wasn't even anything in there to interest him, after coming downstairs from a brief interim of watching crime shows upstairs only to discover that he'd found a way to get to my very very special pumpkin bread which I'd been saving as a treat for myself and devoured every crumb of it, leaving me to weep over the empty package about how all the especially nice things I'm given get ruined, after he similarly disposed of the cake of lotion which was a gift and had been working incredibly well and I'm still not sure how he got to it, we decided that the crate was the way to go after all.
I released and fed him, I let him run around outside until he'd worked himself into a bit of a frenzy while I pottered around on the internet (I pretend that I was being productive, but in reality I was only procrastinating on emailing the parents and telling them what I had subjected their children to during their art period today.) When I let the beast in, he bounded about demanding what appeared to be hugs and kisses, I don't speak dachshund so I'm never entirely sure. One thing that is very fun to do to him, apart from spinning him around until he can no longer walk straight, is hide and call to him. He plays this game well, and we usually call it quits when he sees me, though he best likes the version where I simply throw a blanket over myself and sit very quietly. He knows I know that he knows I'm there, but he also knows I won't move until he pulls away the blanket with his nubby little forepaws. It is so CUTE! Another game is to climb up to where he can't get me and call to him. He hates this, but it's fun.
We played that today. I climbed onto the top of the bunk bed, and since no one else was in the house, I didn't trouble to shush him when he began saying “MOM! MOM MOM-MOM, MOM, MOM MOM!” insistently. I asked him what he wanted, but he seemed to be having difficulties expressing himself. He made it plain that he was no longer interested in food, and although mention of water stirred him to great activity, he had plenty of the stuff in his bowl. He said he wanted out, but his body language said something else entirely. Beyond that, I simply couldn't fathom what it was he desired. I nearly gave up and curled up under the blankets several times, but he was insistent that I was on no account to do any such thing. I asked him if he wanted up, and he began jumping up and down on the lower bunk, yelling at me the whole time. I told him that I didn't appreciate being yelled at, and he had better stop or I should give up on helping him help himself altogether.
We established eventually that he did want up (and he was sorry for yelling at me), so I clambered down, put him on the top bunk and, pleased that my work was done, sat down on the lower bunk. Oddly enough, this action had a very disquieting effect on him. He looked down at me, and whined piteously, and tried from many different angles to find a way down again. I call that gratitude! After I'd gone through such trouble to get him up there in the first place, too. I wish I had a photo of him looking down at me. He discovered the shelf next to my bed in about ten seconds, and might have been able to combine that with gravity to get down at much personal injury. I climbed back up, gave him a hug and a kiss and called him various nonsensical names.
Oddly enough, the next moment involved re-visiting Christmas, moving my bed until it was outside under the deck stairs and installing plywood boards as a replacement for walls and teleporting the whole house to somewhere were the Andes were in sight. The moment after that, I woke up to discover that it was five o'clock, and my turn to make dinner, and I still hadn't emailed the parents.
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