The Homunculus Theory of Cognition Always Appealed to Me

What with one thing and another, I have been spending a lot of my spare time in the last few months scrutinizing my mental processes.  The timing has been good, coinciding as it did with the meatier parts of my graduate school experience, in which the curriculum was equal parts basic engineering, information theory, and, relevantly, cognitive psychology.  So, at a time when I was learning to think about other people's mental experiences, I had a need to look to my own as well.  The crossover benefits are obvious.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing a Surfeit or Deficiency of Sleep From Being a Burden, and for Making It Beneficial To Me

Abstract

For the most part, I sleep fairly well at night, insofar as that I don't often wake up, and I can usually get to sleep quickly as well. However, as far as I can remember, I have never ever been happy to get up.  Whether I'm forced to get up after 5 hours, or reluctantly drag myself into the world after accidentally sleeping 11 hours, I always feel rather terrible; this feeling is what leads me to sleeping for too long, which only makes things worse.  I'm only ever driven out of bed by the alarm, or by shame, and it takes shame a lot longer to penetrate the fog on my consciousness.  It's possible that, for whatever reason, this is just my lot in life; however, I think I can throw some science at this problem over the next semester and find the exact right amount of sleep for me.