It’s 3 a.m.—do you know where your bed is? Are you in it? Are you sound asleep, having crawled under your covers a full eight hours before your phone alarm is scheduled for your rude awakening?
Or are you like me and most other college students, who—according to a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health last August—regularly stay up too late, get up too early and live in chronic sleep deprivation during some of the most formative years of our lives?
We’ve all heard the spiel thousands of times: College students pull all-nighters for classes during the week, party the entire weekend and drink coffee until our cells are inundated in caffeine and our blood runs brown. As a result, we interrupt our natural circadian rhythms, learn more slowly, fall asleep in class, suffer from behavioral problems—and because we’re more prone to depression, we eventually spiral downward into a bottomless, sleepless abyss of despair and misery.
It sounds pretty bad, and maybe it is. After all, the study bemoaned the fact that less than a third of college undergraduates get a regular full night’s sleep. The rest of us stumble into our 10:05 a.m. classes bleary-eyed, yawning and whining about how late we were up the night before. More and more it seems we’re all victims of a scheme designed to subversively rob us of our sleep and our mental health, forcing us into detrimental habits that’ll push us over the edge the minute the caffeine wears off.
Before we turn into a campus of heavy-lidded, half-awake zombies, however, let’s stand up for ourselves (that is, if you’re not too tired to get up from your sprawl on that nice, comfy couch on the third floor of Perkins). Sure, some of us might have been beaten down by a malevolent conspiracy of taxing and unreasonable demands (otherwise known as the esteemed Pratt School of Engineering). If you’re one of the poor, lost souls I’ve seen in the Link poring over a heavily marked electrical engineering book in that delicate hour before dawn, I’m sorry—soldier on, brave warrior, soldier on.
As for the rest of us, I don’t buy the sob story. I’ve passed countless computer screens aglow with the familiar Facebook logos while on a last-minute run to von der Heyden Pavilion at 11:50 p.m. I’ve heard the rowdy conversations we all have in our so-called “study” rooms. I know all too well that glint of competition in the bloodshot eyes of someone out-not-sleeping someone else.
Trust me, no one is eager to get to bed.
The truth is, sleep isn’t all that great. As any night owl will attest, night is just better than day: cozier, more manageable, somehow more intimate than its sunny counterpart. For many a college undergrad, sleeplessness isn’t a sad reality—it’s a choice. We might complain about it all we want, but when it comes right down to it, we prefer to stay up late.
Ask anybody whose sleep schedule actually became more nocturnal during winter break (this includes me, as well as most of my friends)—even if we had the choice, we wouldn’t go to bed at a normal hour. As “This American Life” host Ira Glass recently intimated about a third-shift job he once held, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about the nighttime, an endearing quality to “being up when the rest of the world [is] asleep.” It’s akin to being part of a secret society of sorts, an exclusive clan of dynamism while everyone else lies dormant.
Night is the time of mystery and excitement, a mixing of the mystic and the daring. It houses a jumble of traditions and images, from vampires to cow-tipping, from dazzling thunderstorms to tribal bonfire dances. It’s the period during which anything can happen, when the typical daily boundaries of reality and time twist and open to allow new possibilities, novel experiences. Whether it passes as a few hours nestled in a corner of the library or in a daze of inebriation, the night belongs to the young with whom it shares a spirit of adventure and vitality.
I don’t mean to wax tiresomely poetic, and I’m not implying that we are in fact defying reality by shirking sleep. But to me, a reluctance for going to bed reveals an enthusiasm for life that I expect among college students. If we must forego some alertness during the day, then so be it. In the meantime, in between time, we are alive when it matters most.
So the next time it’s 3 a.m. and you find yourself with nothing else to do, grab an iced coffee from McDonald’s and come find me in the Link.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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