This is the problem with working all night as I did last night: It resets your body clock in a different way and suddenly, your life is Day for Night.
My father used to go to bed each night on schedule. If he didn't have to go in to work the next day, he'd hit the sack between 11:30 and Midnight. He always had to watch the 11:00 news and then maybe a little of Johnny Carson or some other late night show. Then it was off to beddy-bye. If he did have work the next day, it would be an hour earlier, i.e., the Ten O'Clock News. His body seemed to need between 7.5 and eight hours of sleep per night so he'd be up at eight…or on work days, seven. Like clockwork.
My mother went to bed when he went to bed. They were, as I've written here many times, a perfectly-coordinated couple. It may have been the happiest marriage I've ever seen. Both were willing to bend as necessary to the needs of the other person and my mother bent to make her sleeping habits coordinate with him. Those hours were not organic to her.
After he died, she began sleeping on the schedule which felt more natural to her: No schedule at all. She'd sleep when she felt like sleeping and be awake when she felt like being awake. Except when doctor appointments or the arrival of her cleaning lady (or, later on, caregivers) required she be up at a certain hour, she'd sleep in no discernible pattern. She might be up all night and go to bed at 10 in the morning. She might sleep two hours, then be up for four hours, then sleep three more, then be up for nine…
No pattern. No schedule. When I asked her how many hours of sleep she got a day, she answered honestly, "I have no idea." I'm pretty sure it was not the same every day. When I took her to Las Vegas, she'd ask me to make sure to pick a hotel where there was a coffee shop that served breakfast 24/7. She loved a full, restaurant-cooked breakfast — eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, etc. — and wanted to be sure she could get it at any hour, not just in the morning.
I did not inherit my father's sleep-on-a-schedule trait and I rarely sleep more than six hours a night. Five is more often the case. 10 PM until about three in the morning are sometimes my most productive hours for writing…and then the phone starts ringing with calls I don't want to miss between 9 AM and 10 AM. So 3 AM is a good time to go to bed but I sometimes go earlier or later.
It can vary because of a script deadline. It can vary because I have someone sleeping with me. Or it can vary just because I feel like it. Once in a while on a script, I'll hit a brick wall. I have no idea where to go with it next so I'll go to bed and worry about it the next morning. Sometimes, that works great and sometimes, I find myself lying in bed, wide-awake and thinking for what feels like hours about the next part of the script. If I come up with what feels like a great solution, I might get up and trudge back to the computer and do some more…
…and yes, I've been known to get up the next morning, re-read my 4 AM "solution" and decide, "Well, that wasn't such a hot idea…"
The last decade or so, I find my sleep pattern increasingly resembling my mother's after my father passed. That is not always a great idea because it can put you seriously outta sync with the rest of the world. Sometimes, I've found myself in sync with other time zones and not my own. On the various Garfield shows, I often had to interface with Jim Davis (who started his workday in Muncie at 6 AM his time, aka 3 AM my time) or animators in France or Taiwan. It has also been my experience that about one in five editors in New York will forget that when it's 9 AM where they're working, it's 6 AM where I'm sleeping. Or trying to.
Speaking of 6 AM here: I'm going to wrap this up, take the dishes that held my dinner down to the kitchen, feed Lydia if necessary (and it will be necessary) and turn in. It's Sunday so maybe I won't be awoken by someone calling or coming to the door. With careful planning and judicious napping, I might reprogram myself tomorrow to get back to the normal hours I'll need to be up on Monday. I could maybe have made a better start at that goal by not writing this. Good night.