On my screen, a Harvard University physics professor tries to pour one mug of coffee into another. The pouring liquid hugs the side of the mug instead, running down onto the black tray below them. This is introduced to me as the Coandă effect, and soon a hair dryer is raised to blow against a basketball, to show the way that airflow and fluids curve to the shape of nearby surfaces. The mysterious light scraping on the wall outside of my house resumes, and I have to continue to rationalize with myself that this is only scary because it’s 3 a.m.
My friend went to bed hours ago in the midst of our conversation about how she was getting into Formula One recently, so I’ve turned to the internet to shed light on my unanswered questions. I seemingly have nothing better to do while I bide my time waiting for the cup of black tea I had at 4 p.m. to decay in my body. It’s summer, so I’ve forgotten that when I’m not constantly exhausted by school, I’m not someone who can sleep through the caffeine I’ve dosed my body with.
In the wake of my rabbit hole, the tabs I’ve opened are crowding the top of my screen. They have slimmed down to only show the website icon, so I can’t trace exactly how looking up the Formula One schedule led me to the Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations YouTube channel. Somehow, this still feels like the most productive use of my time tonight, as I spent the hour before swiping between X and Instagram Reels.
It’s summer, and I’ve forgotten how I like to really spend my free time when everything is in abundance.
***
“If you had any superpower, what would it be?”
In my childhood home, my bedroom was directly to the right of the staircase. I could hear the echo of each footstep every night when my dad came upstairs, knocked on my door, poked his head in and told me it was time to go to bed. These first steps were the start of a timer, the last few seconds I had left with my book for that night, usually stirring up some annoyance or frustration for me.
Whenever I was asked this question about superpowers during icebreaker activities in elementary school, I knew my answer well. I wanted the ability to freeze time for everyone else but still live through it myself, to turn my world into the Mannequin Challenge videos that my sister and I would film on our mom’s iPad. I liked the idea of having autonomy in how my time could be spent when so much was decided for me at a young age. I dreamed of stopping time when my parents were picking up coffee, to sneak my way behind the counter and enjoy a pastry, no one the wiser. I dreamed of giving myself an extra hour on Saturday mornings to practice the piano music I hadn’t looked at all week ahead of the lessons my parents put me in. I dreamed of pausing my father on the third step to buy myself time to spend with Percy Jackson and his fight against mythological monsters.
As I grew older and responsibilities and time commitments mounted in high school, continuing to eat later into my nights, I learned that I am a bad sleeper. Despite averaging four or five hours of sleep each weeknight, I was never able to sleep in past 9 a.m. on weekends. I’m still the first to wake up at sleepovers, no matter how late the endeavors of the night before took us.
For me, sleep is an unreliable variable. I can’t count on actually falling asleep in the naps I want in the afternoon or that I’ll be able to sleep well before an exam no matter how much melatonin I take, the earplugs I wear or the chamomile tea I drink. I rarely know what it’s like to be well-rested, and thus I changed my answer among freshman year club icebreakers to wish for a superpower where I wouldn’t need to sleep at all. An extra eight hours in my day when everyone else is frozen in sleep and I could read, write and watch everything and anything I wanted sounded like a dream.
***
I wonder a lot about what these fantasy sleepless nights would actually look like, though. Would I actually do more of what I want? I think, like most people, I have certain hobbies I’d rather spend more time on than others — an hour of reading, writing or crocheting rather than X scrolling while half-watching a show on my laptop. In a way, I already know the answer to this question. Through the handful of nights that I’ve lived like my imagined superpowered self, sleepless and jittery, I haven’t strayed toward healthier or more personal ways of spending the extra time in the ways I’d fantasized I would.
I’m guilty of many nights where I stay up late working and promise myself to go to bed right after, only to find myself staying up a few hours, dedicating my time to hobbies of the more mindless, unthinking variety. This phenomenon, coined by psychologists and neuroscientists as revenge bedtime procrastination, occurs when someone has been working all day and intentionally stays up too late doing leisure activities. It’s a subconscious effort for us to reclaim our time and is usually an indicator that we don’t have enough room during our days for pleasure or personal time.
In my life, these instances have proved how much I crave disposable time — frozen hours that “don’t count” so I can scroll to my heart’s content and still feel like I’ve not wasted time I could’ve spent more intentionally. I yearn to have enough time for both types of free time — one where I can use my brain for more enriching activities and one where I can lounge and indulge in that which turns my brain off and doesn’t have to build up toward anything.
Yet in the summer, I’m often spending my time more like the latter. Without structure, it becomes difficult to be intentional about my time in the way a busy schedule forces me to. I’ve “wasted” many mornings scrolling on my phone, afternoons watching TV shows I don’t truly care about and don’t even know if I like and nights ignoring my messy room and piling laundry. Even if I had the ability to freeze time or if I didn’t need to sleep, I doubt that I would have the discipline to take this extra time in the day and spend it in a way I would be proud of.
Because of this, I think the restless nights that give me pockets of disposable time are good because they are so few and far between. As absence makes the heart grow fonder, we need contrast and moderation for anything to feel special. There wouldn’t be novelty to the time I spend learning about velocity physics if it was happening every night.
***
I wake up to the beeping of my analog watch flashing “9:00 a.m.” I drop my dog stuffed animal to push the first button I reach and shut it off. It’s not usually so sudden; usually the world comes into my consciousness by each sense individually, the sound of my dad and the espresso machine coming to me before I stretch out my legs and open my eyes to the sliver of the driveway I can see from my window.
But now that I’m startled awake, everything is here at once. The light hits the posters on my wall and I see the corner of one start to curl where the masking tape needs to be replaced. I hear the shower running, the heavier beats of the music my sister is listening to piercing through the door. My shirt feels sweaty. I push off my comforter and grab my stuffed dog again, rubbing my thumb against its matted fur. My day has just started and is full of possibilities. Waking up in the morning is the best part, because there’s nothing about my day that I can regret spending time on yet.
It’s important that I sleep not only because I am not superhuman and my body needs it, but also because I like the relief of relinquishing control over my time and how I spend it. It’s the only time I can spend truly doing nothing, in an age of oversaturation and entertainment.
I roll onto my side and kick a stuffed animal off my bed in the process. The green dinosaur rolls onto my backpack without a sound, landing belly up. Its plastic eyes stare at me dead-on. I can see the white stitching on the underside of its head and there’s a familiar, childhood twinge of guilt in me at seeing a stuffed animal uncared for. It’s comfortable up here, my foot hooked around the end of the mattress and arm slid under the pillow. My hair is a mess, I promised myself to clean the swamp of dirty clothes on my floor and watching an hour of YouTube before facing any of it seems so appealing.
I don’t have sleep superpowers, I can’t stop time, but I do my civic duty and get up to rescue my fallen civilian.
Statement Contributor Alexandra Coulouris can be reached at couloura@umich.edu.
