It is a typical school night. You are staying up late working on the latest disgustingly long paper for some cruel teacher and you check your neglected AIM and Facebook accounts, only to discover that about half of your friends are either online at that moment with a horrified away message declaring that they haven't started and are going to fail, or have a Facebook status that says that they will be staying up all night working on their paper.

Unfortunately, this occurrence is all too common. I know that personally there has not been a single paper that I have not put off at least a little bit and had to frantically write at the last minute. Every late night spent working on a paper due the next day yields a swarm of people frantically working and talking to other people simultaneously.

In a weird way, most people expect this to happen and take comfort from others in their situation, convincing themselves that they are never the farthest behind. Teachers always warn us not to procrastinate or it will show in our work, but when more than half of the class waits until the night before to start, is it really that obvious?

The after-effect of such a night is a potentially bad grade showing up sometime in the future, and of course not being as alert as possible the next day. This year my first-hour history class has been repeatedly described as "comatose," but the fact is that it is not just the one class. In nearly every class you can find someone secretly nodding off, or with that completely glazed, drooling look that tells everyone that they are zoned out.

I'm not saying that I don't fall asleep in a lot of my classes. My friends even joke about it all the time, saying that I have not been fully awake for an entire day of school yet this year. I laugh and shrug it off, but the fact remains that I do it, and none of the teachers seems to call anyone out on it.

I personally know that we're all thankful for that, because nothing is more embarrassing than waking up, completely out of it, to find everyone in the class gazing intently at you and laughing. I seem to have a built-in block against such an event, because every time my friends look at me, I open my eyes (NOTE: This does not work all the time). Others are not so fortunate, such as a student who fell asleep at his desk with his head tilted to the side and was immediately ridiculed.

Personally, I don't think that these in-class naps are very restful. Your subconscious always seems to know that you shouldn't be asleep as it's very easy for you to be woken up. Then you're left even more tired than before because you're groggy, but you have to move on to the next class. Not to mention the fact that you get lost in class and it's hard to catch up and most people are crankier for being woken up.

The unfortunate trend of sleepless nights at Uni seems to make all of us less alert as the day wears on. In fact, comatose seems to be the most accurate description I have ever heard.

Some people seem to be programmed to nap anywhere (I heard a story once of a person who could repeat the last seven or eight words said to them, while asleep), but for everyone else it is more like an epidemic. The only real solution is to get more sleep and not be bored out of your mind in class.

But for right now, neither of those seems very likely, so I suggest learning how to take notes in your sleep.