Have you ever woken up to find you had missed the end of the movie or show? Not that it happens often, but sometimes a long day can take its toll on my ability to focus and stay awake. You don’t even know it, really, until it happens: All of a sudden you are looking at and listening to other characters doing other things and you are wondering what happened to the show you were watching. Perhaps I’ve seen way too much television, perhaps I can predict almost any plot twist possible, perhaps I need my sleep more than I need to watch another police procedural show. Yet, it makes me mad to miss the end of the show–I want to find out who did it. It makes me mad that I couldn’t stay awake long enough to make it to the end of an hour show. By falling asleep I am reconfirming that most television is only sleep-worthy and that we are all wasting our time with most of what’s on the tube. By falling asleep, I am reconfirming that I don’t sleep enough at night, and I need to change my sleep habits. By missing the end of the show my subconscious is suggesting that most television is not worth watching and that my time would be better invested in sleeping. I fall asleep and miss the end of the show, waking up with a sore neck, a hazy sense of reality, and a lost hour or so. It takes a little while to get one’s bearings when coming up out of the black hole of sleep. So I miss the end of the show, no problem, it won’t be a rerun for me in three months when I see it again.
