Fifteen is the most number of hours that I've slept.
(I was unable to sleep on the airplane during its 10-hour flight.)
In my entire life? How in the heck am I supposed to calculate . . . ok, ok, I’ll give it a shot.
Babies sleep a lot, right? I probably accounted for 10 to 13 hours of sleep every 24 hours for at least 10 months. Great start. For approximately one tenth of my life, I got the recommended 8 hours per night, except when the All-Night Movies played on television on Fridays and Saturdays. So deduct 2 to 4 hours from the 8 twice a week. Wait, cartoons use to play principally on Saturday mornings, so like a lot of red-blooded American kids, I got up early to watch cartoons in my pajamas over a bowl of cereal, most likely corn flakes or raisin bran or Sugar-Infested Hyper-Pops. That took another hour a night from my sleep schedule. Then, as I got older, I began to get about 6 or 7 hours of sleep for a while, but not when I was a teenager, because that’s the point in life when more sleep is automatically necessary due to growing pains and puberty. So I escalated to about 9 or 11 per night, but not when I had a grammar-related test or English composition to study for, at which point I’d sacrifice everything to hit the books. That happened about 3 or 4 times a semester throughout junior high school and high school, so 24 times in all I only slept 3 or four hours. Wait, I joined the Marines at age 18, reveille was usually between 0400 to 0530 regardless of when we hit the rack, and if I had guard duty or stood watch or was out chasing skirts, I’d get by with many fewer hours of sleep than I truly needed, so take about 300 nights in all that I survived with no shuteye. Hold on, I crossed the International Dateline and the Equator a dozen times or more, and I traversed time zones with such frequency that I’m sure I lost and gained sleep hours mathematically. Well, chalk up 80 hours of lost sleep there, subtract them from the total. When I left active duty, I began working in civilian settings, but being both a night owl and a workaholic, 4 or 5 hours of sleep per night were the norm for me. Add on about 60 naps per year at 1-hour, 2-hour, and 6-hour intervals. Many of those were when I dozed off at civil court in restraining order proceedings. The reading of those long lists of fake allegations always bored me. Ok, moving into present time, I’m retired now, but even though I get more sleep now than when I was working, I still go to bed late and get up early. Wait, have you been getting all of this down on paper and tabulate the results? No? I guess I have to start all over again. Grrrrrrr.
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