Falling asleep to Valerian

It's such an old man thing, falling asleep in front of the television, but I've also been doing it for my entire adult life.

My habits when I fall asleep haven't changed much since the first night my parents stopped telling me to go to bed. Back then, I just wanted to watch the weird shit on TV when everybody else had gone to bed. 

And even with the boundless energy of youth, I would often doze off when my ambitions to stay awake could not vibe with reality. I remember struggling to stay awake through screenings of great, great films like Full Metal Jacket and Wild at Heart, but I had to be up at 4.30 to get to work in the morning, y'know? 

But while I still go to bed like a normal person most nights, once every one or two weeks I'll drift off again. Most of the time it's just a pleasantly gentle way of ending the day, in front of some groovy movie or TV show. 

I once got very angry with myself for falling asleep while waiting for the next episode of Red Dwarf and missing it, (and I was right to be angry, it would be literally years before I would get the chance to see that episode again), but that's not really an issue in an age where everything is available all of the time, and now I usually just settle into slumber for an hour or two, before heading off to bed properly.

I keep doing it because I like that weird confusion when I wake up after an hour or so, and there is  something trippy on the TV, something that feels like a dream. 

I don't know why, by my favourite thing to fall asleep to is 2017's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - the film has a trippy, almost unformed vibe, and you don't know if you're going to wake up to somebody falling through space, or Rihanna doing a sci-fi striptease. (The scene where the title character barrels through different climates on the massive giant station hits me in ways I don't think I can ever articulate.)

Sometimes I sleep too long, and it all goes a bit You Fell Asleep Watching A DVD, which is legitimately one of the great art projects of the 21st century. But mostly it's just a short nap before the big sleep, and that's all I need.