The alternate title for this was “Why I Like Being Sleep Deprived.” But I feel that both of these titles require some explanation. The first thing you should know it that I’ve long thought, or perhaps I was told, that when you struggle to fall asleep at night, it’s because you don’t physically need to. I remember I heard once that if you have to lie in bed for over 15 minutes before you fall asleep, it means that you’re getting enough.

And this is about is that torturous time between deciding, usually around 11:45, that it’s time to turn off the light and float away to dreamland and the time that I actually do float away.

Those torturous minutes that I seem to only notice when they venture above 15.

And these are terrible minutes. They’re terrible because you don’t want to think any really good thoughts because you’re liable to forget them by morning. It’s the time when you remember how you didn’t do enough push ups that day, but you have to fight the urge to get up and do them because you know that you’ll inevitably be less tired when you’re done.

This time is rather new to me. I’ve spent many years staying up far too late or getting up too early to be used to this limbo. This time between the essential binary of our lives. Between the doing and the not doing. Between the waking and the sleeping.

Maybe this isn’t the curse of the well-rested. Maybe I’m an insomniac. I doubt that’s the case, but it is possible.

This is a time when too often I have good ideas and feel compelled to get up and jot them down so I have them in the morning. And when I get back to bed I wonder if that hasn’t just prolonged the problem.

But if I must say one good thing about these tortured minutes, and I feel I must, it’s that they never fail to give me at least one good or interesting idea that I seem to miss during the clearly awake part of life.

And so maybe, just maybe, I should be thankful for limbo.