Sleep is for Sissies

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Besides the old reliable, strong coffee, the voluntarily sleepless have other ways of keeping themselves upright for long stretches. Shannon Gragson, 39, of Princeton, Texas, used to take large doses of Metabolife, the over-the-counter diet supplement, before her doctor prescribed a combination of the antidepressant Prozac and the narcolepsy drug Provigil. Carolyn Moncel, 36, who works as a virtual assistant from her computer in Paris, France, fuels her 16-hour shifts with two or three liters a day of Coca-Cola supplemented by 10-minute naps. Betty Sanders, who has worked the graveyard shift at the Dallas U.S. Postal Service Processing Center for more than 18 years, has rejiggered her entire metabolism. She eats dinner at 5 p.m., hits the mattress from 7 until 10, and naps for 15 minutes during her 4 a.m. break. She clocks out at 8:30 in the morning and, except for a one-hour snooze, soldiers on until evening, tending to the needs of a husband who suffers from kidney disease. Then the cycle begins again.

Such stories raise a basic question: Is the waking life actually worth living--or does it feel like a miserable, gray limbo of red eyes, dragging limbs and foggy thoughts? My own experience with Provigil, which I took for several weeks a few years ago during a season of heavy deadlines, convinced me that simple wakefulness is no replacement for genuine restedness. After two or three 18-hour days of writing, the quality of my work collapsed even as my fingers kept on typing. Though some switch deep inside my brain was stuck on "on," my soul and spirit had gone numb, incapable of emotion or creativity. I felt as if I were encased in a full-body cast that allowed me to neither lie down all the way nor sit up truly straight: a mummy man.

Hardened veterans of the nocturnal lifestyle seldom report such problems, and quite a few of them, like Tony Warren, claim they have drastically reduced their need for sustained periods of pillow time. Jason Hensel, 32, a Dallas magazine editor and musician, admits to occasionally daydreaming at work but otherwise has few complaints about a routine that others would find grueling. After putting in nine hours at his day job, Hensel rehearses with his band until 10 p.m. or so and then either heads out for nightclubs or settles in for a late night of DVD viewing. For Hensel, four hours or less of sleep is not only adequate--it's optimal.

"When most people say, 'I feel groggy because I didn't get enough sleep last night,'" says Hensel, "I would say, 'I feel groggy because I got too much sleep.'"

Like many of those who choose to walk by night and to go on walking the following day, Hensel is dogged by the sense that life is short and that too much shut-eye just makes it shorter. "During work," he says, "sometimes I feel that there's so much out there I could be doing." That attitude can take obsessive forms. Kaye White, 48, of Oak Park, Ill., markets McDonald's Happy Meals during the day, then sometimes stays awake until 2 a.m. baking cakes for friends. Once, for a stretch of several weeks, she devoted her extra time to drawing elaborate decorations on her children's lunch bags. "I have a weird compulsion to be superwoman," she says.