Here's an extract from a new book titled How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. The text is kinda long when compared to the usually-brief length of most web pages, but it's interesting and insightful. I've copied several excerpts below. I rarely come across a book that seems interesting enough to read, but this one does. Too bad it's only available in the UK.

The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more than 2,000 years, to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

(I would question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones.)

...

Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition.

...

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world.

...

Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.

...

That being ill can be a delightful way to recapture lost idling time is a fact well known to all young children. On schooldays, the independent child soon learns that if he is ill, then he can lie in bed all day, avoid work and be looked after. What a different world from the everyday one of punishments, recriminations and duties. Suddenly everyone is very nice to you.