Where Do You Sleep Best?

Cavalier King Charles Spaniel asleep in window.

“So you’ve stayed up all night and not slept anything today?”

“Yeah.”

My sister couldn’t understand how I could stay up all night. At the time, I hadn’t had normal sleeping habits for over a year. I looked forward to the day when I could go to bed at night and wake up before noon at least five times a week. And sleep with the light off. If only once. My fear of getting more nightmares caused me to put off sleep — often until the wee hours in the morning, sometimes I went to bed around 8-9 am, other times later. The days somewhat disappeared. A month could feel like a week. I stayed up at night and slept during much of the day.

After an especially terrible nightmare I had a two-week phase in which I forced myself to stay awake until I possibly couldn’t postpone sleep any longer. I didn’t want to sleep and stayed up for days in row. I stayed awake until I was too tired to talk, too tired to eat, and too tired to think — when I had reached that blurry state between awakeness and sleeping. Only then, I could sleep.

Eventually (thank God!) my sleeping patterns improved. I went to bed earlier. I woke up earlier. And I realized how much damage lack of sleep can do to our bodies, overall mood and daily life. I learnt the importance of a good night’s sleep.

Feeling Safe In Darkness

In late April 2009, I went to bed before 11 pm for the first time in longer than I can remember. In October the same year I could finally sleep with the light off. A night last week, when my flatmates had gone to bed, I watched an episode of a vampire series alone in the living room in complete darkness (without feeling the least scared). And when I went to bed afterwards, I felt at peace.

Nowadays, I feel safe in the dark. I no longer fear getting nightmares (and they appear more seldom). I no longer need to look under the bed. I no longer need to sleep with my teddy bear by my side. (Yes, I did use to do that even though my seventh birthday passed almost twenty years ago.) I no longer hide under the covers. The darkness no longer scares me. And that’s a good thing, because I need my dream time. I need my ‘beauty sleep’. Waking up refreshed and full of energy starts the day off in the right way. When you sleep badly, you almost feel as if you walk through fog the next day… you don’t function at your best, neither mentally or physically.

In An Experiment in Sleep Deprivation, Justin Wright shares some interesting facts from Wikipedia:

According to a 2000 study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers in Australia and New Zealand reported that sleep deprivation can have some of the same hazardous effects as being drunk.^[20] People who drove after being awake for 17–19 hours performed worse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent, which is the legal limit for drunk driving in most western European countries (Canada, the U.S. and U.K. set their blood alcohol limits at .08 percent).

Something to think about on your next road trip… Of course, life, work and travels can interfere with sleep. And although there’s nothing wrong with the occasional all-nighter or missing a few hours sleep from time to time, you’ll obviously feel much better when you have slept sufficiently.

Enough Sleep Leads To Better Travel Experiences

In 3 travel secrets…, Cheryl Marie Cordeiro writes about the benefits of a good night’s sleep when travelling:

I think I get so much more out of the visit if I wake up fully rested and raring to go, rather than completely jet lagged with my system out of sync, dampening the senses and what information they can give when experiencing something new.

Looking back, I have enjoyed some of my best daytime travel experiences after having gotten plenty of sleep. And, looking past my period of insomnia, I have slept better during trips abroad (excluding certain hostel stays) than anywhere else. Above all in the big wooden house my parents rented with another family in the Austrian ski resort Dienten (mostly thanks to the soft duvet covers), in the bunk bed at the summer camp in Michigan, in the bed with flowery covers in my room in Montbonnot-Saint-Martin, in the place I rented in Zurich, in our rental apartment on Lanzarote, in my cozy bedsit in Notting Hill, and in basically every hotel I had the pleasure of staying in. To me, in a way, hotels can feel like home. And when at home, I sleep very well.

Sleeping Outside

I also have a weakness for sleeping outside. One summer night at the age of four, I got the impulsive idea of sleeping on my grandmother’s balcony. I can still remember the crisp and fresh air, hearing the birds chirp, and the peacefulness of sleeping near nature. Another summer a few years later, some friends and I decided to sleep by the sand dunes near the beach. I loved hearing the sound of the lapping waves before falling asleep.

At 17 or 18, during a particularly warm night after a party near my parents’ summer cottage, I slept in my sleeping bag outside in the garden rather than in my bed inside. And a winter night a couple of years ago, I slept outside on the porch — under a full moon and a sea of stars that lit up the sky. But when I woke up shaking (despite having put on extra clothes, a hat and gloves) at 5 am in the morning, I went inside.

As for future sleeping experiences, I would love to sleep outside in the desert, on the deck of a cruise ship or sailing boat, on a beach somewhere warm, and in a hammock on a tropical island.

How about you? Where did/do you sleep best? And where would you like to sleep?