Slumber party ... Photograph: Dan Chung
Nobody ever admits to dropping off during a performance, do they? Well I am about to. Though I've managed to stay wide awake for absolute marathons (nine-and-a-half hours of Henry VI the other weekend; I didn't fall asleep once when I listened to 16 hours of Wagner in one day for an article), I have been guilty, on occasion, of "resting the eyes", as one music critic friend puts it.
For some reason, this happens especially in the cinema, and often in really embarrassingly good films - I once slumbered blissfully through most of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, which I am told is excellent, and I had a terrible problem dropping off repeatedly through Tarkovsky's Solaris at the National Film Theatre, which is not something to be proud of.
Anyway, we've all done it, haven't we?
That moment when you just shift your weight a little to get more comfortable, then your head starts to drop, sometimes with such violence you wake yourself up again (stupidly pretending, perhaps, to have been nodding enthusiastically at something happening on stage). I fell asleep during Waiting For Godot at the Barbican this year, and someone I vaguely knew was sitting behind me and actually emailed me about it the next day - the embarrassment!
It doesn't happen that often, I promise, but I can definitely recall times I've slept through almost entire acts at the theatre and woken up just as the last corpse is being hauled off, the lovers reunited and the triple wedding is about to happen without the foggiest idea about how we got there. It seems strangely unpredictable, too - sometimes it's your inner critic reacting to a bad show; sometimes it's just a tired head in a warm dark room. And the fear you might have been snoring, dribbling, or worse. Share your horror stories ...
.png?w=600)
