Collateralised Sleep Obligations.

How much coffee in one day is too much? Should one stop when one is feeling alert? Jittery? How about when people point you out in the street as a poster boy for amphetamine abuse? I personally believe the tipping point comes when my kidneys spontaneously tear themselves free from my torso and seek asylum in someone else's body. Fortunately this has only happened a couple of times.

With all the coffee I drink its amazing I sleep at night. Actually its amazing I slow down long enough to draw breath. The truth of the matter is I sleep like a baby. That is; in twenty minute stints from which I wake up crying but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the coffee. My neighbours will certainly be glad when I start sleeping through the night.

I'm a little ambivalent about sleep. It takes up time I could use to watch late night movies or surf the internet. Having reviewed the last sentence I'm forced to admit that sleeping is the most productive thing I'm likely to be doing at that time of night. It's certainly the most healthy. To be honest I quite like sleeping. I'd like it even more if I wasn't always asleep when it happened. It sort of detracts from the experience.

I wonder if you can market sleep? At this point there is an advertising agency assuring me they could market pretty much anything with a good hook and a celebrity endorsement. What would be the slogan for a sleep marketing campaign? "Sleep, the third most fun thing you can do in bed!" or how about, "Sleep, when death comes don't be unprepared!" or for the more realistic out there "Sleep, what else are you likely to be doing anyway?"

Once we have a thriving market in sleep there will be sleep companies, sleep products and different categories of sleep for the ordinary and high end market. Trading in the shares of sleep companies could revitalise our economy (you remember when we had one?) and lead us on to more exciting ventures. We could trade in sleep derivatives, chopping a good nights sleep into individual catnaps and bundling them together to create packages that could back complicated debt instruments which we could then sell to gullible halfwits like the world's premier financial institutions. At some point of course the wheels would fall off as we discover we have now packaged and sold more sleep than you could obtain by putting the entire population into a coma. This would lead what is left of our economy collapsing and desperate shortages across the world. Soon it won't be long before we're all losing sleep.