The Sunday before Labor Day is the perfect time to take up an essay about sleep disturbances brought on by anxieties about the coming day. There are no Sunday Scaries tonight. Lately my sleep has been very stable and restful, actually, which I think is a reflection of having minimal anxieties in my life these days.

But I do admit that I’m especially prone to sleep poorly on most Sunday nights, especially when I have meetings scheduled for Monday morning. The level of anxiety is based on the importance of the meeting, my role in it, how early in begins and whether I need to go into the office for attendance. The same scenario played out on a Thursday or Friday would trigger far less anxiety in me.

To me, sleep is both a reflection of my current state of mental health and the single most important factor in maintaining inner stability. In this essay, Montaigne extols generals who were able to sleep like a baby the night before a battle — and good for them, I suppose — but I don’t think we should judge a person’s stability based on such high expectations.

Rather, I think if you have something important going on in your life, perhaps even something troubling, and you can still get to sleep at a reasonable hour and get enough rest to feel refreshed, that goes a long way towards solving whatever problem is at hand.

As Montaigne points out, the necessity of sleep is different for nearly everyone and what constitutes quality sleep is as well. I don’t really grasp the concept of “sleeping through the night” because I never do it. Avoiding getting up no more than once per night is a victory for me. Neither do I consider “tossing and turning” to be a sign of poor quality sleep — it’s been the way I sleep since I was a baby and I do not expect it to change at my age.

It does cause me issues, however. I have a very difficult time sharing a bed with someone overnight and having gotten entirely out of the habit of doing so over the last several years, I’m not sure I could do it again without acquiring a bed roughly the size of my bedroom. When in a circumstance where I do end up sharing a bed, and especially so with someone I don’t know very well, I tend to restrict myself to a small corner of the bed and end up sleeping terribly as a result.

This isn’t so much an issue with my dog, however, and Bogey takes up as much space in my bed as he pleases most nights. Today I went to his favorite pet store to get him a bone, something that always gives him comfort. But because they didn’t have his favorite type in stock, I ended up buying a salmon skin bone for him.

I just washed my sheets and put them on the bed, and then Bogey jumped up with that foul smelling salmon skin in his mouth. He’s been ripping it apart the last 15 minutes, making a mess of those sheets and just a moment ago fell asleep on top of that partially devoured piece of ocean trash.

It’s funny how the very same smell can bring comfort to one animal and revulsion to another, a subject I’m sure Montaigne would have enjoyed.