In this paper, we propose an active node selection framework for compressive sleeping wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in order to improve the signal acquisition performance and network lifetime. The node selection can be seen as a specialized sensing matrix design problem where the sensing matrix consists of selected rows of an identity matrix. By capitalizing on a genie-aided reconstruction procedure, we formulate the active node selection problem into an optimization problem, which is then approximated by a constrained convex relaxation plus a rounding scheme. The proposed approach also exploits the partially known signal support, which can be obtained from the previous signal reconstruction. Simulation results show that our proposed active node selection approach leads to an improved reconstruction performance and network lifetime in comparison to various node selection schemes for compressive sleeping WSNs.