That’s what this piece on Slate asks.

In a word, the answer is: No.

At least, from all evidence, not this night owl.

Some time even before puberty, it became almost impossible to go to sleep at what most people would consider a “reasonable” hour. I remember as a boy reading comic books by flashlight under the blankets so that my parents wouldn’t see my light on. By age 12 I gave up on that and just used the lamp, because my parents had given up on trying to get me to go to sleep early. In adulthood, here’s what I’ve discovered: My body wants to fall asleep somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m., and get up at 10:30. To prove it once again, I set no alarm clock when I was in Nebraska and just let my regular cycle happen — and I fell asleep between 3 and 4 a.m., and woke up at 10:30.

In addition to being a night owl, I have a further complication. Just about everyone in my family has what I’ve come to decide is a sleep disorder:

• My father was a somnambulist (sleep walker)
• So was his father
• I am a somnambulist and a nocturnalist (someone who can’t fall asleep early, and doesn’t sleep well)
• Both my brothers are nocturnalists
• My sister is a somnambulist
• I believe all five of my adult nieces and nephews sleep talk or sleep walk
• My elder son sleepwalks
• My daughter sleepwalks and sleep talks
• My younger son sleep talks and, if I read the signs on the landing correctly the other night, was walking around doing something in his sleep

Clearly, there must be something genetic behind all this. Given the other maladies one can pick up genetically — say, sickle-cell anemia or the sort of cancer that has torn a hole through Jimmy Carter’s family — this isn’t so bad. Although I do wonder on occasion what a full good night’s sleep might feel like.

When I was back in New Jersey recently, my birth family and I were discussing all this. (Yet again.) Treatments we had tried came up. My one brother takes sleeping pills, which I have relentlessly avoided because I don’t want to spend the next day feeling drugged. (I have a low tolerance for medications.) My other brother, the one who gets up at 5 or 6 a.m. (!) just stays up late. I’ve tried acupuncture, which worked brilliantly, but it wears off and I get tired of building it into my regular routine. I’ve tried exercise to tire myself out, but weight training, racquetball, firewood-chopping, and even marathon training isn’t putting me to sleep. Hypnosis was the single best remedy yet, resulting in an immediate sleep benefit that shocked my wife (“I kept checking on you because I thought you were dead!”), but gradually it wore off and now I need to find a new hypnotist.

Yes, I’ve read books with titles like “Get a Good Night’s Sleep.” I’ve tried herbal remedies and, as I said, hypnosis and acupuncture, and also resetting my circadian clock, and taking vitamins, and drinking warm milk, and laying off caffeine and on and on. I’ve done everything but go to a sleep lab for testing, which I’ll get around to at some point. This would be less of a problem if two of my three school-age children didn’t need me to get up with them at the ungodly hour of 7:06 a.m. twice a week, roughly four hours after my body would actually like to be asleep. If I could figure a workaround — some other way to get them up and out on Mondays and Tuesdays — the world would be a better place. But in the meantime, whenever I come across an article like that one on Slate, I always read it in the hopes that it has something new to say. So far, it never has.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under On being, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.