I take my sleep nowadays whenever I can get it, and God only knows when that will be.

Time was when I nodded off at 11:15 every evening and you could set your watch by it. Then I slept straight through until 6:30 a.m., when I awoke with no alarm. Always. Every day.

That seems like eons ago. I don’t know when I’ll fall asleep tonight. It could be at 10:00 p.m., but it could be at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m., after tossing in bed for half the night. It seems to have nothing to do with my stress level or what I did the day before.

On nights when I nod off early, I may find myself wide awake at 3:30 or 4 in the morning and realize that I’m not going back to sleep. When that happens, I often get up, dress and go out on the porch to read, pray and wait for the birds to start chirping. I’ve come to enjoy those quiet early mornings alone on the porch.

And then there are the times, once a night nowadays (at least), when I wake up in the middle of the night and get out of bed for a purpose anyone over 65 can identify without my having to spell it out.

My daytime sleep patterns have also changed. Sometimes I nod off in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. I enjoy those naps, but it feels wrong. Time was when I never took a mid-day nap.

When I mention all this to other old geezers, I find I am not alone. Irregular sleep is apparently a normal part of growing old, so I’m learning to live with my new sleep pattern (if something so erratic can be called a pattern).

There is some good news. Till Roenneberg, a professor of chronobiology and medical psychology in Munich, has studied sleep. He says few people need a continuous eight hours of sleep. Different people need different amounts of sleep. Part of the difference is genetic and part of it is, yes, a function of age. Eleven percent of people sleep just six hours a day and function fine, Roenneberg says. And sleeping several times a day for shorter periods works best for some people.

It’s also untrue that “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Take that, Ben Franklin. Some people are naturally night people and others are naturally morning people.

But if you must set an alarm to get up in the morning and then drag yourself bleary-eyed to the bathroom, you’re probably not getting enough sleep. You should probably go to bed earlier, take a mid-day nap or stop drinking so much the night before.

But back to that nap. Why does it seem so unnatural to me? People in Latin countries take naps routinely, and when I occasionally found 30 minutes for an afternoon nap during my days as a pastor, I found it hugely revitalizing. Maybe everyone should nap during the day.

Teenagers are something else. I stayed awake until 3 a.m. when I was home on college break and didn’t get out of bed until noon, which infuriated my father who said I’d never amount to anything. I soon outgrew keeping such hours, so I can say with certainty today that if my life has been a waste, it wasn’t because I slept in every morning.

Research shows that teenagers, whose bodies are still growing, need between nine and 10 hours of sleep a night. But their biological clocks tell them not to fall asleep until midnight or later.

So why does high school begin at 8 a.m.? No wonder our teens seem so lethargic much of the time. We’ve structured their lives around what works for us, not what works for them. It’s as if we give our teenagers perpetual jet-lag. And then we stick them with afternoon and evening extra-curricular tasks which exhaust them all the more.

Perhaps with the advent of the hand-held phone/computer/television/encyclopedia, we’ll all soon be able to do what we need to do whenever it pleases us to do it. As a happy retiree, I’m almost there already. Except for my sleep pattern.

Richard H. Schmidt is a retired Episcopal priest, editor and author who lives in Fairhope. He can be reached at courier@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.