I think while I nap, so it's not a waste of time.

-- Martha Stewart

Most of you know by now that former President Clinton was caught last week taking a nap in church.

The cameras were rolling, the speaker was speaking and the former leader of the free world, not to mention Arkansas, was dreaming.

Well, you know reporters.

They couldn't wait to make fun, and some even brought up sites of past Clinton naps, such as Ronald Reagan's funeral and even a New York Mets baseball game.

I say give him a break.

If you're going to fall asleep in public, church is as good a place as any. It's usually warm, safe and some guy is talking in comforting tones.

Personally, church is just one of the many places I've nodded off.

Close friends like to remind me of the time I fell asleep in a wedding (not mine), which was sort of embarrassing because I was wearing an usher's tux and the photographer in the balcony preserved it for posterity.

I always shrug and say, "That was some bachelor party," and everybody laughs except the bride, who in keeping with tradition had no sense of humor.

Have you ever fallen asleep on a city bus? Yeah, me, too.

There's nothing quite like being roused by a driver at the end of the line and discovering your stop was several miles back, and, no, he's not going back that way, either.

In recent years I've found business seminars nap-worthy. After you've finished your glass of water and crunched all the peppermints in the bowl, what is there left to do?

I try to stay awake and take notes, but a later look will show what started out as legible gradually yielded to hieroglyphical.

The worst, I guess, was in college. Suffering the sleep deprivation of my fraternity initiation week, I was sitting in a big lecture hall (after lunch) listening to a lesson on philosophy.

Well, you know what happened.

I dozed off and woke up several hours later.

Only now, it was a different class, different lecture, different professor, different students sitting beside me taking notes.

That is a very weird feeling.

I looked at my watch and realized I had slept through parts of three college class presentations: The one that was my class, the one I woke up in, and a middle one that has forever remained a mystery.

In my dreams, it was always the most interesting.