Few things can be as remarkably as refreshing as a catnap in a society dominated by rat race. The murderous tensions eat up our vitality. We look forward to newer and newer medicines, tranquillisers without side effects and meditation camps. But a little search round the corner of our mind can pop up solutions absolutely free like this. Picking of this habit could be as easy as breathing.

 A catnap for humans is that little snatch of sleep most blissful when stolen from a day’s legitimate business. It is naturally very brief — a half-hour; may be 15 minutes. Even five minutes will do. Some seasoned practitioners can blank out effectively for just sixty seconds and will wake up feeling completely refreshed. The point is to remember that naps can pack up great deal of value into small amounts.

            The catnap is quite different from the long institutionalized sleep extending over an hour or two, in the afternoon, which slips into the realm of siesta. Far from being institutionalized, the nap has no rules at all. The famous Bengali author Parashuram portrays an accountant Baboo of the British period who used to enjoy cat naps at will, in spite of the regular rounds of the “Saheb” by adjusting his specs and keeping the tip of his pen nimbly on the ledger, only to start murmuring  the figures when the  “Saheb” approached him right from the back! Quite a difficult feat indeed.

            In reality an experienced napper can scan the premises and quickly find some place to lie his head down and promptly dose off. For the beginner, this not so easy. It requires some inventiveness plus complete shamelessness, rooted in a firm conviction that it is not a sin or even breach of manners, to be found napping. It also requires the ability to pass quickly and efficiently from the waking state to the sleeping state and equally easily back to wakefulness again – without feeling groggy or even looking rumpled. And for humans who have lost the knack, it can be relearned.

            The technique of nap, like those of everything else (sex, politics, writing) is meaningful in the larger context, in which they serve. Here before you can make use of fast sleep method, you need to know a bit of about the exquisite rewards of a good nap and also the practical problems of stealing one, at midday. The choice you face between an open and furtive napper and the prejudices against napping which can keep you stubbornly awake, no matter how tired you are. So be up in arms against these prejudices. In other words, instilling the right attitude, is essential at first.

            Know first that, in this area of expertise you and I are as knowledgeable as anyone else. It will be too ambitious to find out the latest findings or glean the tested data on such a “contraband” subject. We still don’t know why so short a sleep of ten minutes or for that matter, one minute, can be so refreshing to many harassed people. Obviously it relaxes the muscles. But what else? It could be that it stops conscious thought processes, and in this way, relieves anxiety. Some psychologists believe that non-dreaming sleep helps problem solving mechanism. This area, along with Hypnosis, has been a favourite subject of modern researchers.  . But more we learn about it, the more it seems mysterious. In our country also, a concept called “Yoganidra” is advocated for persons, who are perforce, required to keep awake, more than the normal individuals.

Certainly cat napping should be taken on a much lighter vein. Regard napping simply as a childish trick that you can master (and effectively you can put to use for your complete well-being, like riding a bike, flying a kite or swimming. Do not forget that napping is a far more a useful trick than these. It can be a lie preserver by reducing stress, by being handy way out, in moments of killing tension and extreme weariness or when problems at hand appear insurmountable.

If you try to recall the last time when you made a costly wrong decision, you will find that it was out of sheer exhaustion.  Was that really necessary? Most decisions can be shelved for twenty or thirty minutes, the time for a little snooze. The need to sleep on it implies that our sleep induced thought processes could act as catalysts to our wakeful logical decision making process. Some researchers even go to that length to say that some Nobel Prizes were owned as the result of the catnaps and incidentally, many important ideas have been the result of dream or thought activity during a brief sleep. The most famous is that of a chemist named Kekule. He dreamt of a snake bent into a circle holding its tail into its mouth. Which immediately gave him the idea for ring like structure of the Benzene molecule, for which his logical search process yielded no result.

The nap brings clarity. It brings a whole rainbow of alternate solutions. It also comes without costs or side effects as compared to all kinds of muscle relaxants, tranquillisers and alcohol. The satisfaction of quick nap is often in direct proportion to the inappropriateness of the occasion. The experienced napper can lie down or sit up in bright lights or noise in full view of other people and conk like a child. The nap being described here is meant for really busy people who need to catch some nap on the wings! Late Pandit Jawarhal Nehru, who was accustomed to an extremely busy schedule, relied on such naps on the move when his days extended 34 hours and beyond.  Another example is that of Elanor Roosevelt who was known to keep a killing schedule and was doubtless one of the most prestigious and furtive nappers ever produced by the exigencies of Public life.  She napped regularly on speaker’s platforms, always awakening at the split second before she was introduced. The best of her napping feat   was her snooze in a slow elevator between the thirteenth floor and the ground.

You cannot doze off; when your conscience tells you it is wrong to do so in hours, when the rest of the world is officially awake. For example one commonly held view that has been proven false, is that the daytime nap interferes with a good sleep at night. If a nap does keep anyone awake at night it is more because that people think that they have done something wrong.  In reality people tend to be very rigid in their conception of sleep as if it were a finite commodity like money or time. It is, as if the mankind has been allotted a given number of hours to sleep, at night and should some weary soul use up a bit of this allotment in daytime he must perforce pay back in wakefulness, at night. This is a notion guaranteed to induce insomnia. Such expenditure of sleep may not diminish its supply, rather could generate more.

Another prejudice against napping is rooted in our culture, which has now turned essentially Western in outlook. It is still generally thought unmanly to nap like that, and it only is allowable to convalescents, female models, movie stars (beauty sleep), pensioners, astronauts (who remain safely wired to the Ground Control for the wake up signal) and others considered, beyond the ambit of our work –a-day culture.

 Almost everybody takes secret naps. This nap is not a waste of time; on the contrary, it saves time, because you work so much productively afterwards. A suggested technique, though it is as “contraband” as the subject, is as follows. Always choose the moment after the meal when a full stomach invites sleep. Relax anywhere at all, on a bench or a couch and use whatever handy for a rest. If you are a beginner, take off your shoes and loosen your belt and any other clothing that is tight. Otherwise remain fully dressed. Some people suggest that you may keep clean but crumpled socks, in your drawer, to be brought out when alone and to imitate the condition for relaxation.  To make this a realistic practice, keep all the lights on and learn to use your eyelids as the total shield. Keep a tab on your watch, because noting the time before and after somehow turns the nap into an important appointment that you are keeping with yourself.

Your eyes now closed. Do not try to forget the problems on your mind. Just postpone them only. Pretend you are a movie, stopped in mid-action and the movie will restart in half an hour’s time. Remind yourself that you are not stopping for a day or a week, but literally for a blink. Imagine that somewhere inside you there is a button, a switch that is still running “ON”.

You most right now imagine turning it “OFF”.

Go limp and concentrate on deep breathing. After a few moments think of black velvet, unending thick black velvet, softly surrounding you. You are now asleep. When you have fully mastered the trick and are basking in its benefit, you might even pass it on.