You know the drill. It's [Thursday] afternoon. You have just returned from your physics lecture and have one-and-a-half hours before your next class. You have a 10-page philosophy paper due at 4 p.m. With much reluctance, you sit at your desk, open up your laptop and glare murderously for about 15 seconds at the innocent computer screen. After the mandatory rituals of checking Facebook, checking your e-mail and checking Facebook again just in case anything has changed, you open the essay and start typing. You had already finished saying everything that could conceivably relate to the topic (and a significant quantity of unrelated blather) by the seventh page, stretched out your essay to its breaking point to reach the eighth page and haven't the faintest idea what to do to fill up the last two. Repetition? A bibliography? A disclaimer?

You decide that the agonizing 10 minutes of intense strategizing merits a break, and after glancing at the clock, you realize that you have enough time for a quick nap! You lie down on your bed, eagerly set your alarm to ring within 40 minutes, and are dead to the world within three. One- and-a-half hours later, having turned off the alarm entirely after making it snooze 17 times, you get up and groggily look at the time. 4:10 p.m.

The Collegiate Nap seems less like a habit and more like a crucial feature of our culture. The first thing that I did after (hopefully) finalizing my schedule for my spring semester was to check which days would offer optimal napping privileges. Everybody naps. Really. And these naps are not even confined to the conventional daytime Spanish siestas: It has become absurdly common to take a nap sometime between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. to break the bleary-eyed hysteria of the inevitable all-nighter.

Adhering to the cult of the Nap can sometimes have disastrous consequences. If you were awake till 6 a.m. the night before, the likelihood that you will be capable of waking up after an hour's sleep is remote, to say the least. A possible solution is to ask a roommate or a friend to come in and violently shake you awake, but that doesn't necessarily work either. One of my friends precedes each nap with a request to wake her up within a certain amount of time. But when we try, she responds frighteningly venomously. "My lab got rescheduled!" "My 1:30 class is on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays!" "My lecture's cancelled!" None of these, of course, is true. It's an unbreakable weakness that she calls "sleep lying" because she never remembers saying any of this when she wakes up, furious and frantic, seven hours later.

Certainly, the surrender to the Nap is not always a conscious choice. When one is so exhausted that the discouragingly fat hardcover chemistry textbook begins to look temptingly soft, the nap is more of a collapse than a rational decision. Yet when one naps with the idea of taking a restful break, it can be very beneficial. A quick nap between classes can be very rejuvenating, giving the student the clarity and ability to study better.

In addition to this newfound talent of falling asleep in a variety of uncomfortable physical positions, thanks to the embarrassing frequency of my naps that occur at any and every hour of the day, we have now additionally developed the enviable ability to sleep through anything. Examples include the deafening construction at Wilcox Hall, your roommate's habit of walking straight into the ladder of the bunk bed and the thumps from the boys' room upstairs that, as a rule, you don't care to know the origin of.

When confronted with a lab report, an essay, 200 pages of reading and a problem set, perhaps the only logical and reasonable response is to just humbly accept defeat, close your eyes and sink into blissful slumber. It makes one wonder how we'll get through the stresses of an actual job without a pillow stowed under the desk, conveniently placed for the essential six naps that are mandatory during an eight-hour work day.

Incidentally, it took me four naps to get through the writing of this column.

Camille Framroze is a columnist for the Daily Princetonian at Princeton University. Courtesy of UWIRE.