A weird thought occurred to me the other night as I got into bed wearing my Teletubby PJs, which were a present from an ex-girlfriend who thought they were cute . . . but, after seeing me in them, decided that I wasn’t.
While I was lying there, I suddenly thought to myself, “This going to bed every night business is absolutely nuts!”
There’s a joke about a fellah who goes to the doctor and says, “You have to help me, doc, I’m an insomniac!”. To which the doctor replies, “Well, don’t lose any sleep over it!”
But insomnia is no joke.
Many people find it difficult to get off to sleep and that night I stayed awake for hours, pondering over this instinct all humans have for getting into bed at the end of the day and leaving the world behind to fend for itself for several hours.
Mentioning this, I feel like some sort of social pioneer, because I don’t think anybody else has ever questioned our nightly ritual of slipping under the duvet, switching off the light and hoping we’ll fall asleep.
Well, not until the night the thought buzzed around inside my head that eight hours out of our 24 are, to all intents and purposes, wasted!
Just think how much more productive we’d be if sleep hadn’t been ‘invented’.  What would we all do with those extra eight hours?
With 56 hours a week at your disposal, perhaps you’d finally get around to writing that book you wanted to . . . “If you only had the time”.
You might even create that best-seller you’ve always dreamed of.
Except of course, without sleep, dreams wouldn’t exist.
So we’d have lost out on some great songs like “In Dreams” (Roy Orbison); “Dream” (Everly Brothers); “Dreams”(Fleetwood Mac and The Corrs”); “Dream Lover” (Bobby Darin) and “Any Dream Will Do”.
Err . . . I don’t think we’d have lost out on that one, necessarily.
If we didn’t sleep, we wouldn’t need beds, bedrooms or bedside tables and lamps.  We wouldn’t need pillows, duvets, sheets, nightgowns or pyjamas.
Which reminds me. Anyone want to buy a pair of Teletubby PJs?