Getting Along with Getting Up

I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.

--Samuel Johnson, 1773

People who spring from bed clear-eyed and cheerful tend to think the early bird really does catch the worm. Slugabeds grumble that the sunny risers are worms themselves. For Ben Franklin and puritanical believers in his maxims, to be earlier than thou is virtually to be holier. But early-morning surly birds dispute them. After all, no less an American culture hero than Robert Frost milked his cows at midnight because he could not be bothered to get up and do it at sunrise. These days, researchers are slowly waking up to waking up.

Men in primitive societies sometimes require as little as two hours of sleep a day; yet they may be almost free of the Great Trauma. In many countries, people refuse to wake each other, thinking that a man's soul wanders at night and may not have time to get back if sleep ends prematurely. But for industrial societies, the schedules are merciless. Rising at the crack, grumped German Journalist Johannes Gross recently, condemns modern man to the life of peasants. Mutters Pablo Picasso, "I understand why they execute condemned men at dawn. I just have to see the dawn in order to have my head roll all by itself." Hungarian Author Ferenc Molnar was so unaccustomed to daylight that once, when he was dragooned into jury duty in the early morning, he looked incredulously at the thronged streets of Budapest and asked, "Are they all jurors?"

Owls and Introverts. The relatively new interdisciplinary science of sleep research may eventually come to vindicate the groggy "owls" and deflate the superior pretentions of the "larks." Humans run on still-mysterious physiological clocks, their body temperatures dipping as much as 2 degrees in the middle of the night and rising toward morning. Late risers, one explanation runs, simply may not be hot enough to get up easily. Deep sleep and light sleep also alternate at different rates; many researchers now argue that slow risers are in a period of heavy sleep when their alarm clocks clang. For yet unexplained reasons, however, some 20% of Americans enjoy accurate internal alarm clocks that wake them automatically.

Introverts function best in the morning, according to British Psychologist Donald Eric Broadbent, but some other psychologists say that the early risers are egotistical--they get up with the idea the world is waiting for them. Adds one: "There is definite evidence that early risers tend to sleep in pajamas, while late risers sleep in underwear or the nude." Edward Stonehill, a British psychologist, notes: "A man may choose to be a milkman because he likes to get up at 4 a.m., not because he has trained himself to wake early." Other psychologists agree that recalcitrant risers simply do not like the activity that awaits them and subconsciously would rather stay in the womb of sleep. It is also well known that early-rising spouses often suffer attacks of fury at the sight of a still-sleeping partner. The only relief: to wake him or her by slamming doors, turning on radios, or sending relays of children to jump up and down on the bed.

Taking another tack, a study made of 600 people in Florida found that the people who woke up most happily were the ones accustomed to regular sleeping habits. Hypnotists can occasionally snap morning drowsers out of their grogginess by implanting suggestions during a trance. It may be, says Psychophysiologist Harvey D. Cohen of Brooklyn's Downstate Medical Center, that researchers will one day show people how to synchronize their sleep and work cycles.

Creativity and Catapults. Such human engineering, of course, would stunt the passionate creativity that slow risers now use to bedevil themselves out of bed. One Los Angeles ad man takes a deep draught of vodka, which, he says, tricks him into thinking it's still last night and he's awake and having a good time. The wife of one comedian once baked him out of bed by turning up the dial on his electric blanket. Humorist Robert Benchley's secretary used to wake him up with such snappy lines as "The men have come to flood the bed for ice skating."

Norman Dine, 60, the insomniac proprietor of a New Jersey store called the "Sleep Center," provides his clients with custom tape-recorded exhortations from their minister or psychiatrist. One nagged, "You hate to face reality because you think you don't measure up. It's absurd to dwell on something like this." Of course, many iron-willed morning veterans rely on nothing more complicated than putting the alarm clock across the room. But if that fails, for $384, Dine sells an ejecting bed. At the proper ungodly hour, it catapults its owner upright.

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