"Had a nice sleep?" my mother would ask, full of praise for sleep therapy.
But, when I grew up and left the sleep clinic that was my childhood home, I found that other people, actually most people, don't sleep all the time. I was genuinely shocked.
I discovered that people who have extra sleeps during the day can even be regarded as a bit lazy.
My husband is rarely caught napping and from the moment he wakes up he leaps out of bed as if it is a hot frying pan, not returning until that night.
He also likes to make the bed after he has leaped as a further signal to his brain that sleep time is definitely over. Unfortunately, I am usually still in bed where I sometimes work all morning on my laptop.
So he just makes the bed around me.
In other cultures, such as Spain's, Italy's and France's people are very sophisticated and take a siesta in the afternoon, I like to tell people as an explanation for my frequent sleeping.
But I don't live in another culture. I live in New Zealand where sleeping is slothful.
My indolence is also compounded by my working from home where occasionally my employers ring me.
"She's having a sle ... I mean, she's not available at the moment," I have trained my children to say. But with friends they are brutally honest.
"She's in bed, again," I heard one of them say. "There may be a brief hour when she is up so I'll get her to call you back then."
So I had to do something. It's called meditation. I took myself off a few years ago to learn how to do it and now meditation is a posh way to sleep.
"I'm just off to meditate!" sounds so much more meaningful than "I'm off for a snooze".
Somehow the fact that you sit up while you meditate rather than lie down is seen as evidence that you're not being lazy, you're being healthy. So my two meditations a day have become my substitutes for sleep.
Recently, I treated myself to a whole day of meditation at a retreat.
I'd never been to a retreat before but had several prejudices to overcome. First I had to check that there would be no hand holding seated in circles, trust exercises or sharing. Then I had to check that the whole day would, in fact, be spent with my eyes mostly shut.
It was a sleeping person's heaven. Deep breathing, a few yoga exercises, a bit of breathing in and out of several nostrils and then a lie down. We did this three times and I've never felt more at home.
"How was it?" asked my husband when I glided in through the front door.
"It was like being a 5-year-old again and curling up in my little bed in my room with the polka dot wallpaper," I gurgled.
"Great," he said wearily. "You must be full of energy. Let's go for a walk."
"It it's okay with you I'll just have a wee lie down, I mean, meditation."
