On rare occasions, the crew would catch Shepard asleep. Usually, it's at the desk in his cabin, intel and analyses flickering with unforgiving insistence on his terminal, body tipped at an ungainly angle in the chair, seemingly drunk from exhaustion. Once (twice?), he was found in Starboard Observation, the softly snoring center of a constellation of datapads and Alliance documentation.
One of the things they teach you fairly early when serving aboard the Normandy is to give the slumbering Commander a wide, wide berth. Under no circumstances should you wake him personally. If the Commander must be alerted, contact the bridge, and Joker or EDI will do so from the safety of the overhead comm. You would not want to trigger the startle response of someone so uneasy in his dreams and so finely tuned for explosive violence.
