Succumbing to sleep in lecture, gracefully

I got on the R train the last time I was in Brooklyn. On the bench across from me, an old woman clad in a full pink tracksuit was wedged between two rotund men. Had I been in her position, I would have been rather unhappy. She, however, seemed quite comfortable — in fact, she and the men forming the bulwark around her were fast asleep.

I was reminded of this image in lecture this week. Glancing around the room, I saw all of my classmates sitting comfortably together, totally out of it. The difference between them and my friends on the train was slight: My classmates were just a little less portly and divided by desks.

There’s lots of variety in how we do it. Some of us move into the full-on hunch over our desks, which, in McCosh 50, is really miraculous. Some lean back and clasp their hands. Others, decidedly the most frightening, have mastered sleeping with their eyes open, constantly gaping at the professor. Finally, there are those that lean forward and, well, sway. At any rate, it seems that we’re all asleep most of the time. In my lecture last week, I could identify more than one of each of these types. In fact, when I looked around, the whole room seemed nothing short of comatose.

This is not to be mistaken for laziness. This is, in fact, a talent.

While I find myself falling victim to a merciless Hypnos, for others, he is the kind, unassuming figure of a John William Waterhouse painting. Some people have the wonderful, God-given gift of being able to work with him; others gradually hone the invaluable ability to sleep whenever and wherever possible.

They don’t only sleep whenever possible — they manage to sleep in an inoffensive way. The girl who sits across from me in lecture, for instance, clasps her hands and looks down into her lap. In this position, she seems more contemplative than asleep.

A friend of mine is aware of her sleeping habits and brings a tape recorder to every lecture. She then props her head up on her fist and looks attentive, while she pays back her sleep debt. Not only is her sleeping innocuous, but she doesn’t lose the lecture.

The Force is not strong with others. Consider the mess of limbs who sits across from me — let’s call him Frank. Frank settles for minutes at a time, and then suddenly, with a dramatic gesture, wakes from his sleep, pulls himself upright by his hair and after a few moments slowly sinks back down. Frank’s agony is clear: so clear, in fact, that his sleeping is disruptive to the rest of the class.

I am too afraid to sleep in class, for fear that I will become like Frank. Likewise, I have an irrational fear of falling asleep on the subway because I know without a doubt that I will miss my stop and wind up in Queens, God forbid. Some of my fellow New Yorkers have a skill similar to sleeping in lecture. They remain entirely stationary and seem to be asleep, but somehow they manage to open their eyes and collect themselves just before the right stop.

The talent to wake up on demand is useful in precepts and small classes as well. There is a boy in my precept whose continuous breathing is only interrupted occasionally by a sleepy snort. But by some magical force at play, he wakes up every 10 minutes or so and says something relatively insightful, maybe a little profound — and, remarkably, in context.

While I’m desperately holding up my head with my shaky over-caffeinated hands, I admire this kid’s ability to nonchalantly sleep in class — at first. Sleep deprivation, however, eventually overwhelms my admiration, and it quickly melts into wild jealousy.

This skill is especially useful during midterms week, when nights are spent cramming for tests. Ironically, we sleep through classes because we have tests in those same classes. Unlike sleeping on the subway — even for those who have mastered the art of being inconspicuous — sleeping through class can be detrimental. Modifications like the tape-recorder are helpful, but in the end they only relocate the time spent listening. Sleeping through class is more productive than battling sleep through class. This fight is so consuming that it is not worth the few bits of information you can piece together after class. Instead, by befriending sleep, we can perhaps be productive after all.