This weekend, I took a “snuggle nap” with Edwin in our bedroom. I’ve been holding him a lot during his naps this week, because he’s been waking up after one sleep cycle (about 45 minutes) but still feeling tired afterward, so I’m trying to get him to take longer naps by rocking him through that sleep cycle break. It’s been pretty effective so far, and I’m hoping that in a few more days I can transition him back into the crib (not that I don’t enjoy holding him, but I can’t get anything done during nap time). Yesterday I took it a step further by actually lying down with him, since he’s been waking up around 5 AM every morning (another sleep problem we’re working on) and I was tired. But I forgot, when I lay down, to bring my phone into the bedroom with me. We don’t have a clock in our room, not even an alarm clock, because we use our phones (even though I’m always worried about getting brain cancer from sleeping next to a cell phone….is that a real concern?) so I was stuck there, a sleeping boy pinning me down, not knowing what time it was. 

It was torture.

Remember the movie I.Q., with Meg Ryan as Albert Einstein’s brilliant niece and Tim Robbins as the garage mechanic who falls in love with her? Meg Ryan’s fiance in the movie is a scientist doing a time deprivation experiment, keeping a young man locked in a room with no timepiece. Throughout that scene, the young man screams in terror and desperation. At the end of the scene, one of Einstein’s friends gives the young man a watch to hide under his pants leg. Whenever I watch the movie, my heart clenches for the poor man, and I breathe a sigh of relief when he’s given the watch. I’m sure I wouldn’t hold up well under any form of torture, but time deprivation would be one of the worst.

Why is that? Why does the simple thought of being outside of time make my throat close up? I never wear watches over the summer. I don’t want to know what time it is when I’m relaxing, I suppose because time is irrelevant. But when I want to know, and I can’t find out, it drives me up the wall. 

Here are a few theories:

1. Time is valuable, because it’s a limited resource. All of us on earth only get a finite amount of time, and none of us knows how small or great our number is. That’s why “wasting time” is such a sin, especially in our society.

2. Time is powerful, because we have no control over it, and yet we all have to live by its dictates. Even if you’re a hermit in the woods, you still have to be aware of time. How else would you know when to plant seeds, and when to prepare for avalanches?

3. Time is unpredictable, because our perception of it changes based on what we’re doing. We “lose” long blocks of time when we’re asleep. Time “drags on” when we’re doing an unpleasant task; it “speeds up” when we’re having fun. We can emerge from a room thinking we’ve been asleep for minutes, and it can turn out to have been hours.

Have you ever thought about time deprivation? What does it do to you?