A recent poem of mine concludes with the line: "Writers don’t sleep." It seems ever since I penned that sentence, this concept has been reinforcing itself, most often at 4 a.m. where I sit at my keyboard at pound away (or pack UPS packages to send back that have been sitting under my kitchen table for several weeks now).

It has not always been this way. Besides not always having UPS to send back, I used to be one of those kids who could sleep almost anywhere. My parents would brag to neighbors how they would pile me, at the age of two, into the back seat of the car along with raincoats, camera gear, stuffed animals and whatever else you pack to bring a toddler to the Grand Canyon. I would then merrily slumber all the way from Michigan to Arizona, waking only briefly in Missouri when I sensed a rest stop and smelled Kentucky Fried Chicken.

As I got older and tried sleeping in transit, but on the subway instead of in a car, I woke up in the train yard in Coney Island. It’s pretty scary stuff, being disoriented and out in the wiles of Stillwell Avenue with a gruff conductor who does not find it amusing that you are too discombobulated to heed his call for LAST STOP. It’s doubly awful when you soon realize that during your nap, which began sometime in midtown Manhattan, someone stole your bag containing a rare cassette of the bootleg version of The Doors’ "L.A. Woman."

Sleep walking is another activity I outgrew, not that I was ever very adept at it. I would, however, mysteriously float above and out of my bed every time I heard a potato chip bag open or the sound of the microwave zapping Jeno’s Pizza Rolls.

It’s that illusionary theory that if you go to bed you could be missing something dreadfully important. This mindset lasted well into my teens, causing me to stay awake and bleary eyed through the late night drone of movies like "Them" on Saturday 3 a.m. TV. It was also the motive behind an evil experiment conducted by me and my cousin in which we tried to see how long we could stay awake by sitting on the front porch and drinking pot after pot of tepid instant coffee. Our experiment resulted in a purple haze that clouded our vision the next day at the mall, causing everything to look like an alien planet.

Nightmares are another good reason to stay awake. Ever since I got my dream catcher, I have been having less of them. And it’s been years since I have had the sort that wake you up bouncing on your bed, as if you just fell 2,000 feet from the sky or laying on your back but yet running in place being chased by three mass murderers.

So why the sleeplessness? A coworker of mine always blamed sleep apnea. I tried this one for a while until I read up on it, finding out that one of the symptoms include stopping breathing. My very recent bout of sleeplessness can be traced as a direct result to my surgical procedure which leaves me jolted awake in pain as soon as the Tylenol wears off. It could also be the result of my new job which begins soon and leaves me giddy and excited, rife with anticipation. And the rest can be chalked up to artist syndrome.

It is truly hard to doze off when you have a mischievous muse who dapples you with ideas at wee hours of the night from every direction. I sleep (or lay there) with a pen and notebook by my pillow, of course, and have learned quite aptly to write in the dark (even though I bought a $7 pen equipped with a battery light at the nib).