IT might have looked as if I was dozing like an old lady in my garden the other day, with my head lolling lifelessly and my chin resting attractively on my chest, but I most certainly wasn't.

Okay, so my neighbour may have heard the faintest of snuffles coming from the vague direction of my garden chair as he rattled and coughed his way into his shed in an embarrassed, but valiant, attempt to pretend he hadn't actually seen me.

And my son may have thought he was being oh-so-clever when he started running Thomas the Tank Engine up and down my trouser leg while singing his own version of Sleeping Bunnies, in which the yodelling finale of "wake up bunnies" was replaced with "wake up mummies... hop little mummies, hop, hop, hop".

But they were both very wrong if they thought my crumpled, snoozing frame was any indication of old lady-style dozing. I wasn't sleeping in the old fashioned, stereotypical way at all. I was power napping.

What do you mean you've never heard of anything so preposterous in your life? If you haven't come across power napping yet, you're obviously not a go-getting, trend-setting, young professional person like myself.

It doesn't matter if my go-getting has got up and gone and that the only setting I do these days involves jelly not trends. I still know where the young kids are at, and it seems most of them are head down on their desk having forty winks.

Young professional people are apparently now taking post-lunch power naps to recharge their batteries for the remaining 12 hours of their 18-hour working days.

In America - where else? - companies have embraced the power nap culture, providing comfy cots for afternoon snooze fests in what used to be the board room but is now the bed and board room.

Winston Churchill famously advocated a daily sleep between lunch and dinner, while Albert Einstein and Napoleon Bonaparte were both regular mid-afternoon nappers.

So you see, when I dozed off in my garden chair in the middle of a fascinating discussion with the Munchkin about which animals have winkles and which don't, I was in very good company.

I was, I believe, just giving my hard-working brain a break and letting my body recharge its batteries for the arduous tasks ahead (ie removing the tea from the freezer and putting it in the microwave).

Afternoon naps are not just the territory of toddlers, they are a haven for people who otherwise have to wrestle with big ideas rattling around their big brains.

Unfortunately, I fear that while this category automatically includes Winnie, Al and Boney, I am actually lurking among a completely different set of happy nappers.

If I'm honest, I don't believe I was power napping at all. I think my brain was so bored with not having anything more taxing to think about than the words to The Wheels On The Bus that it simply shut down in protest for a while.

It is this category of snoozing I fit into, the category where your brain cells simply doze off because of loneliness, the category occupied by occasionally mindless mums such as myself and a certain Mr R Reagan, formerly of Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington.

I don't mean to sound disparaging about a former leader of the free world, but I heard that Ronnie was quite adept at falling asleep throughout the day. He was even known to occasionally fall fast asleep in a garden chair on the front lawn of the White House while Mrs Thatcher pottered in a nearby shed pretending not to notice.

But there is one good thing to come out of my sudden talent for unplanned snoozing; I'll probably live a bit longer. According to Professor Alexandros Vgontzas (made up name alert) of Pennsylvania State University, women live longer than men because they sleep better. The fact is that we are more resistant to the effects of sleep deprivation because we have evolved to cope with crying babies and disturbed nights.

So I can look forward to a long and happy life. I just won't be awake to enjoy it.

Updated: 09:26 Tuesday, September 10, 2002