Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone has a forte, some claim excellence in the arts while others revel in scientific pursuits. But I for one, seem to be a maverick, a misfit of sorts and claim expertise over no mean accomplishment than being an absolute authority on the art of sleeping.

In fact our feline friends, who are old hands at the game, could take a lesson or two from me. Now as you know cats also need to forage for food, I too have to abandon my favourite friend 'Sleep' and go to work.

It is indeed a contradiction that my nightmares begin with waking up and if I were Shakespeare my Hamlet would morosely mouth "To wake up or not, that is the question".

In the morning, I drag myself out of bed like a zombie and God be with anyone who dare cross my path at this hour. In fact, at home, my grand dad, who was well aware of my idiosyncrasies, would jokingly admonish everyone against approaching me early in the morning.

I admit that I do have a predilection for sleeping but to make my next point clear I need to borrow from the bard again.

In Hamlet he says 'to sleep, perchance to dream, aye there's the rub', well, in my case there is no catch, for my sleep is seldom disturbed by dreams. And even if I happen to venture into dreamland I can never make head or tales of it, perhaps Freud's gray matter would come in handy to demystify my dreams.

In fact, last night was one such rare occasion when I did a Dr Do Little in my dream. I saw that my linguistic capabilities had been miraculously usurped by our bovine brethren and before I could masticate more on it or have my own version of the "theatre of the absurd" (remembering Ionesco's Rhinoceros), I was "alarmed" out of my sleep by the cruel clanging of my phone. At such times I wish I was born in the Stone Age when there were no alarms or phones, but then again, I reason it out, that in ancient times the rooster heralded the dawn of a day and obviously it didn’t come with a snooze or silent option so I am better off with the technology of our times.

Now, sleeping for me is an art perfected by a very few of our species and I certainly am a child prodigy at it, for since time immemorial I have been practising it with great finesse. The catnaps, the forty winks snooze, the baby sleep and the sound slumbers.

No lover can claim to love his beloved as I love sleeping for I am certain that there is no better bedfellow than sleep and no symphony sweeter than the sound of bon nuit!.....