I didn’t know there was an unspoken culture around sleep in New Zealand until I developed narcolepsy and started falling asleep at ‘not-normal’ times (e.g., while a friend is telling me a really important moment in their life story) in ‘not-normal’ places (e.g., waiting in line at the bank).
I get that seeing someone start to fall asleep in the middle of the day while standing up is not the usual. Or finding it hard not to stare in a cafe when someone (me) ends up with my hand in my latte – oops – fell asleep.
I get it. Most of us sleep in private.
But when you have no control over when or where you fall asleep, the way sleep is ‘seen’ or understood by a culture becomes much more obvious.
My take on this? The underlying message (and sometimes not so subtle message) I have picked up from others while living in NZ, is that falling asleep in the daytime is weird, it can make other people feel uncomfortable, it’s a sign of laziness, it signals some kind of fail (clearly can’t handle your sleep deprivation, look at me I can stay awake on 4 hours sleep), and it is rude. Falling asleep at times that are not night time in your bed, is generally frowned upon.
So let’s jump to South Korea 2001.
I need to time-stamp my story as it’s now a lifetime ago, and culture evolves and changes. So this is my experience of Korean culture at that particular moment in time.
Full disclosure, I fell in love with Korea. So everything I say is sprinkled with generous doses of spicy, sparkly, kimchi flavoured love. I fell hard for just about every person I saw, was awe-struck by the language, singing, dancing, and the 24/7 charge-up and go attitude. Food was a whole other world in itself. I had no idea what I was eating most of the time (to begin with anyway) and loved almost every new and delightful dish put in front of me.
Ok, so it wasn’t all rose-tinted spectacles. I absolutely hated my first job. I was teaching 4 year old kiddies (a completely terrifying age) to read, write and speak english when they didn’t even know how to hold a pencil. Epic fail.
But then I secured a fantastic job where my students were all grown-ups (in full control of their writing tools) and would yell out to me “I love you, teacher” and “you are so beautiful” whenever I would walk into the classroom.
(The 4 year olds would just chuck their pencils on the floor and say they were done).
Anyway, I digress (what was the point of this story again…?) So, I loved Korea, even with a crappy job (and let’s be honest, I actually grew to love the 4 year olds too). And once I had found my sweet spot with a teaching job that made me feel like a superstar everyday, I didn’t really think things could be any sweeter.
But there was more.
The cherry on the top?
The complete acceptance of my sleep condition.
Ok, so people stared at me all the time. I was a weirdo just by nature of being a white skinned foreign body who spoke english. For some people, I was the first “foreigner” they had ever met. I was pointed at, prodded, and my hair was patted and stroked by older women. Sometimes I was the cause of total elation (walk into a room and people scream with excitement) or the cause of rage (lock eyes with an older gentleman who decides you are responsible for everything wrong with the world and worthy of a couple of well-aimed taekwondo kicks while we are here). There was never a shortage of attention.
But when it came to falling asleep in weird places at weird times – I was completely ignored. Nobody cared. If anything, this was when I fitted in and was most accepted as I just joined all the other people who were sleeping in weird places at weird times.
In Korea, I could just be sleepy me. It was completely liberating. And was when I started to realise that I didn’t feel accepted when I fell asleep at odd times in New Zealand. This was probably when I first started to pay attention to the “culture of sleep” and how we view sleep.
And I think we have work to do.
