The modern office isn't designed for privacy, and most of our cubicles have no doors to close,only gaps in the portable partitions. Lay our heads down on the desk at the appropriate hour and we're exposed to any passing snitch who strolls the halls enforcing alertness. It's a wonder they don't walk around ringing bells and blowing trumpets from one till three.

American employers do not see the afternoon forty winks as refreshing the creative wellsprings of mere employees. They see it as goofing off. But now, it's time to rethink the nap from both the corporate and the personal viewpoint. Bed is not a shameful, shiftless place to be by day, nor is it necessary to run a fever of 102 to deserve it.

Bed can even be productive. The effortless horizontal body and the sensory deprivation of the quiet bedroom leave the mind free, even in sleep, to focus, to roam, sometimes to forge ahead. Knotty problems can unknot themselves as if by magic. Creative solutions can tiptoe across the coverlet and nestle onto the pillow of the napper, even while the black velvet paws of Morpheus lie closely over his eyes.

He may wake half an hour later with the road ahead laid clear. Creativity doesn't come a running to those who toil and slave for her; she's as much the daughter of rest and play as of effort. Just because we're uncomfortable doesn't mean we're productive; just because we're comfortable doesn't mean we're lazy. Milton wrote Paradise Lost in bed. Winston Churchill, a prodigious producer, wrote all those large important histories in bed. Brandy bottle at the ready. No doubt when inspiration flagged and his thoughts refused to marshal, he took a nip and a nap. Now, there was a man who knew a thing or two about a good day's work.