The Secret Energy Source for Writers, Politicians and Geniuses

The art of napping is not just for toddlers or languid house cats stretched out in patches of sun.
A mere 20 minutes was all he needed to split his day in half, effectively getting “two days in one” and thus neatly solving the perpetual problem of there only being 24 hours in a day.
These brief respites, often taken directly on the battlefield atop a bear skin, were more than mere rest; they were strategic tools.
He was fascinated by the hypnagogic state, that peculiar borderland between waking and sleeping, where one’s thoughts drift off in strange, semi-lucid directions.
He noted that, in this fragile, half-aware state, ideas presented themselves with a clarity and strangeness that ordinary wakefulness could never produce.
Leonardo’s devotion to his art was such that he decided ordinary sleep was an inefficient use of time and began following what’s now known as the Uberman sleep cycle.
This polyphasic schedule, essentially a series of 20-minute naps taken every four hours, allowed him to function on just two hours of sleep per day while he worked meticulously on the Mona Lisa’s smile.
Einstein’s naps were more of a finely tuned, scientifically engineered micro-event, designed to keep him hovering on the edge of consciousness.
Like Aristotle, he allowed himself to dip into the shallow waters of stage one sleep, never venturing further.
To prevent himself from drifting into the dangerous depths of real sleep, he would sit upright in his armchair, gripping a pencil (or, for added flair, a spoon). As he started to doze, the pencil would slip from his fingers, clanging dramatically to the floor and jolting him awake.
JFK had picked up the practice from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in turn had picked it up from, yes, you guessed it, Winston Churchill.
Having introduced the world to the lightbulb, he had a distinctly ambivalent relationship with sleep, which he regarded as a rather outdated nuisance “from our cave days.”
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis could hardly resist a quick midday snooze, muttering something profound about dragons no doubt.
Haruki Murakami, the enigmatic Japanese writer whose novels blend surrealism, magical realism, and a hefty dose of pop culture references, has achieved literary fame not just for his tales of talking cats and alternate realities, but also for his commitment to the fine art of napping.
For Murakami, naps are practically a part-time job. Reports suggest he takes up to four naps a day, with each nap timed with the precision of a Swiss watch.
The moral, if there is one (and there almost certainly isn’t), is that napping may well be the ultimate weapon in the productivity arsenal, as demonstrated by everyone from generals to geniuses, politicians to painters.
The nap is an essential ritual, honed to a fine art by people who, in the grand scheme of things, probably could have changed the world without it, but they didn’t, and that’s perhaps a point worth pondering over a nice 20 minute kip.