The Unauthorised Sleep Manual

It is currently 3:00 AM. Your left ankle is exposed to the floor monsters, your brain is doing advanced calculus to figure out exactly how many minutes of sleep you have left, and this guide is the only thing standing between you and complete exhaustion.

Stage One: The “Tactical Coma” (Parent Check)

The creaking of the door; the sound of approaching footsteps; and you’ve got to immediately “Tactical Coma.” You have to freeze in the middle of the toss of your phone, breathe creepily with your breaths in a rhythm that would make anyone think you were possessed by a demon, and relax your facial expression. Your mother enters, checks to see whether you’re still playing with your phone in the middle of the night, and then leaves. Great! You made it through. But your heart beats too fast for you to sleep anymore.

Step 2: The Thermal Crisis (Too Hot, Too Cold)

You put on the blanket. Four minutes later, your bed turns into an oven giving off heat energy from the earth. Your body is sweating profusely. You are suffocating to death. You take off the blanket. Instantly, it becomes cold enough for an Arctic wind. It is freezing your kneecaps. You experiment with the one-leg-out method to keep yourself warm or cool. You think that you might get eaten by the shadow monsters lurking under your bed.

Stage 3: The Wall Hugger

Panic strikes as you realize that you’re sweating like mad on the hot mattress. There’s no other place to go but the far edge of the bed, where you can touch the wall. It feels good; it’s a relief. This is where you will stay for 90 seconds of bliss as you cling to the wall like some sort of reptile.

Stage 4: The Existential Calculator

It is currently 4:17 AM. You wake up and glance at the clock. Your mind instantly kicks into gear with its super calculator abilities: "If I sleep for exactly one minute from now, I will have slept two hours, forty-three minutes, and twelve seconds." You squeeze your eyes even tighter. You attempt to quiet your mind, but this only causes it to play an audio file that is poor quality and a song that you hated five years ago.

Stage 5: The Morning Betrayal

Your alarm goes off. Suddenly, and only at this exact moment, your bed becomes the most comfortable, cloud-like, perfectly temperature-regulated paradise in the universe. Your eyelids weigh six hundred pounds. You are finally, perfectly ready for a deep sleep—just in time to get up and do it all over again.

Final Note: If you happen to be reading this right now at 3:00 AM, trying to hide your lit-up smartphone from your parents, please do not pick up that phone. The wall is not going to embrace itself; your bare foot is currently unprotected from whatever lurks below the bed, and the tune that pops up from 2012 will haunt you until you actually stop thinking about it. Get some sleep or else the monster under the bed will never let you sleep again.