Evil Naps

An exercise in brevity.

I am sitting in a chair across from my bed, typing with heavy eyes. Just beyond my laptop screen, a heaping pile of blankets and pillows sings a familiar siren song of sleep and waking well-rested. I’m exhausted, but it’s four in the afternoon. Any nap I take now will, of course, be evil.

I’m not sure where that designation came from. “Evil nap” is absolutely the kind of thing I would say, though. As a kindergartener, I hated naptime with a fiery passion— I could not sleep in a half-lit classroom on a half-inch of cheap foam for a bed, so I spent the half-hour counting the ceiling tiles over and over and over again. My opinion has not swayed much since then.

But naps are not inherently evil. Any insomniac worth their weight in melatonin can tell you that; a good nap can save a day, a week, a month from the bleary wastes of daylight fatigue. So what makes an evil nap evil? I contend there are three factors. Avoid them, and avoid the overwhelming existential horror that comes with waking up wrong.

One: timing.

Timing is the most obvious calling card of an evil nap. A busy individual must not sleep at an awkward hour— for example, four P.M., if one’s activities end at three and they aim to go to bed for the night at nine— lest they run the risk of their rest running too long to be healing. A well-timed nap must fall squarely between one’s last busy hour of the day and their intended nightly bedtime. If this rule is ignored, the nap may be misinterpreted by the insomniac brain to be the cue for eternal hibernation, and regardless of timer or alarm set, one may remain asleep for thousands of years, or worse, until 7:23 or some other uncomfortable, uneven time. One wakes confused to a dark sky and heaps of unfinished homework. The nap is tainted.

Two: temperature.

This is another delicate scale to balance, but a subtler, finer one— and, even worse, it changes by the individual whom it impacts. I, for one, run warm as a space heater, or perhaps a werewolf from the Twilight franchise. It is dangerous, then, for me to nap when the temperature is pleasantly chill; my temperature will equalize perfectly with my environment and I will turn into a statue for centuries innumerable. But for a more vampire-coded individual, whose standard body temperature runs around the same as the Costco cold room, the reverse would be true: summer afternoons become nap-traps, and the evil is all-consuming.

Three: business.

The last, and arguably most important factor to consider when debating the efficacy of a potential upcoming nap, is business. It is a dangerous game to use sleep as a balm for stress if the stress is clear and present— i.e., a deadline within the next few hours. It’s the plight of the overworked college student choosing between an all-nighter or otherwise, the “just wake up early and do it in the morning” dilemma. Business makes a nap go sour. Every. Single. Time.

And what is the result of an evil nap?

Horror. Torment. Dread and suffering. You wake up and the world is fundamentally wrong, blurry and smoky at the edges, painted in shrimp colors and gloaming and thermal imaging brightness. Time, already a weird soup, is now an impenetrable glacier, sliding endlessly and imperceptibly at the corners of your existence. And, even in the center of this great waking nightmare, you still have homework.

I do not recommend it. But I’m devastated to report to you, fair reader, that this recommendation comes from experience. I began to write this post at four. At five, my will failed me, and sleep— evil sleep— consumed all. I woke up at six, and now it is nine. I have finally shaken off the residual exhaustion.

Bedtime is in an hour. I am wide awake. Tomorrow is another day.

How the world looks when you’re sleepy and comfortable.