Reasons For Existence - Post a comment

People are able to reach tomorrow by sleeping. So long as you are human, you sleep nearly half your life. That means, if you are to live fifty years, twenty of it is spent at rest.

Kazuo Koike

During the late seventies I read a story about a man who didn't need to sleep, and how he dealt with the boredom each night. He would continue to do the same thing until it got old, then move on to something new. Each incident got progressively worse, and at the end, he was doing something most would find unthinkable. But his only concern was what happened when he got bored with that. It wasn't a great story, but reading it always made me wonder what it would be like if it happened to me.

If you didn't need to sleep, it would be possible to hold down a steady job, and still have all the free time you did while on summer vacation from school. It wouldn't matter if you put in extra time at work, since it would still be possible to draw what you wanted for eight more hours each night. You could work out, read, watch DVDs, and have plenty of time to ponder the universe. It always sounded like the best of both worlds.

Since that time I've read other stories about people who didn't sleep, unfortunately most show them fall apart and lose their minds. Except for Tick Tock by Dean Koontz, that was fun. So after you reach tomorrow, try reading that.