I rarely sleep well, but some nights are more gruelling than others. This is a record of an especially restless night: messages from the frontier of sleeplessness…
It’s like this some nights: the land of sleep is a nightclub with an implacable door policy.
That’s one way I visualise my insomnia: I’m queuing alone outside a nightclub. It may seem a strange analogy, but then sleep can be an active, vivid state. Anyway, the key point is: I want a piece of the action (or inaction, if you prefer).
If it helps, picture the venue as a popular dive bar, the kind of unpretentious and evergreen venue you might find downtown in a US city.
I’m waiting to be let into this place. The muffled hum of promise emanates from inside. Who is in there? Old friends. New friends. I know I’ll be welcome, when I get in.
I wait my turn. Time goes on. No patron is seen to leave. After some time, I notice that the venue has become quieter. The door staff have vanished.
Imperceptibly, the building shuts down – slowly drained of colour, like a corpse. I am still outside to observe it happening.
Welcome to Insomnia Town, the home of reliable disappointment and shit metaphors.
I’m in town for the night. I have some time to kill.
1am
There’s something mildly therapeutic about writing about insomnia – it feels like a kind of exorcism. Maybe I can ‘knit up the ravelled sleeve’ of all these nights into something useful?
The idea feels reassuring and redemptive but I know this coupon is only redeemable on one occasion. It isn’t the solution that will turn shit into sugar, night after night.
I’ve been back and forth to the bedroom several times now, following the advice to get out of bed if you haven’t fallen asleep after 20 minutes.
When I do try and get comfortable, I’m confronted with a host of problems that, on any other night, I could ignore.
The bed is full of unexpected niggles. It’s a cold night and it feels like there is a wind tunnel between me and my wife. Do we always have a gap like that between us, or has she just gathered too much of the duvet on her side?
Exactly how are my knees supposed to stack in bed?
When I sleep on my side, I can’t seem to find a place to tuck my right arm.
Also: how are my knees supposed to stack? There doesn’t seem to be an arrangement that doesn’t eventually cause gnawing discomfort.
And another question, if I may: is that sensation of prickling warmth on my skin being caused by residual heat from the radiators, or is it just my own body generating it, for some unknown reason?
If I do manage to get my limbs in order, then we can move on to the cerebral challenges.
How does the process of falling asleep even start? What’s the ‘trigger movement’?
This is what it’s like when I try to explain my specific brand of insomnia to people: it’s like someone’s left the TV on.
I lie there, for hours, not thinking of anything in particular but definitely experiencing thoughts. These are not anxious or exciting thoughts – they’re the same genus of trivial nonsense that fleetingly crosses your mind just before you fall asleep on a good night.
But they just go on, and on, like infomercials and music videos. We never cut to the test card or to a continuity loop. There is programming all night. Before you know it, you realise it’s 2am and your brain is no closer to shutting down than it was earlier.
You’re still in the queue at the dive bar.
It isn’t going to happen. You’re not getting in tonight.
Fast asleep in this dangerous world
Few songs better describe the solitude and yearning that accompanies insomnia like ‘When Tomorrow Comes’. Annie Lennox sings of watching a loved one as they sleep, and vowing to protect them: The moon is pale outside / and you are far from here.
As the night draws on you really are alone, together. There’s some comfort in knowing your spouse would be there for you if you needed to wake them, but really, how can they help? One can comfort a children back to sleep, but rarely an adult.
The sentiment of ‘When Tomorrow Comes’ is bittersweet: fundamentally, if temporarily, you are alone. All you can do is wait to make good on your promises; all of today’s chances have been used up.
Another day, another night / has taken you again my dear.
2am
There are only two useful outcomes from insomnia that I can identify.
The first is that, because I’m already alert and awake, I can answer and quell my four-year-old’s occasional stirrings before they wake her mother.
The second is that I can address my inexhaustible backlog of reading matter. Just not ‘the good stuff’.
Sleeplessness is boring by default, by definition, because it isn’t allowed to be interesting. It cannot involve the search for pleasure; the slight inflection of monotony seems to be your best hope for drowsiness.
My stack of potential reading matter – my supposed sleep aids – seem only of partial use. A good 50% of the material comprises comic books and graphic novels.
Sequential art is off limits to the insomniac – much of the content is too effervescent and the delivery varies too much. Comic panels don’t have the hypnotic effect of lines of text, the flare path that guides you into sleep as you read in bed.
Insomnia is a treadmill of obligation
Insomnia is an unrelenting treadmill of obligation, of what you should and should not do: you should have a regular bedtime routine, you should not look at the time (but, paradoxically, you should get out of bed after more than 20 minutes of sleeplessness).
And the next day you should try to have a normal day so you can reset your broken body clock and have a chance of a decent night’s sleep, the next time around.
Insomnia is eating your greens, all night long.
A hunt for justice
I can’t precisely remember when I started suffering from sleeplessness. Certainly it’s been worse since the birth of my daughter. Never bad enough to warrant medical attention but annoying enough to provoke elaborate attempts to fix it.
We may as well draw up the probable causes. Four main culprits are under suspicion tonight, and all of them are known to the authorities, having been recurring factors in the sleeplessness that has dogged me for several years now.
- Existential dread and loneliness
- Earworm(s)
- Wife (late to bed)
- Mild yet persistent gastric discomfort
All of these factors are in play this evening, generating a perfect storm. But which of these is principally responsible, and how might they be related?
Let’s begin with the most unpleasant factor: existential maelstrom.
A great writer summarised the issue perfectly, some four decades ago:
what time is it
anyway
what thoughts
can I call allies
I pray for a break
from all thought
a clean break
in blank space
Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles
Tonight, my allies are few. There’s basically me and my Inner Chimp, and he is not on my side.
I miss everyone and everything. Although it seems odd to miss my wife and child, the feeling is validated by said Chimp. Well, no wonder you miss these people, he points out, you didn’t give them your full attention when they were awake.
I’m already in rueful agreement with his insight, when he points to the broader implications. Your parents are getting older, he notes, and you’ve racked up untold missed opportunities with them. All those hours accumulated in cars, at the dinner table, watching TV on the sofa. Your mind was always on something else, on some triviality, and not on the person sitting beside you.
Now, if an acquaintance talked to you like this you’d tell them where to go. But in the dead of night this sounds like the wisdom of the Great Sages.
Did I ever see my family and friends as who they really were? Or was it just who I needed them to be – wanted them to be – in the moment, for the sake of convenience?
Bad father; bad husband; bad son; bad friend.
My existential dread feels intractable, tidal
The existential dread feels intractable, tidal. But while it makes the insomnia far worse than it needs to be, it seems as epiphenomenal as my inability to stack my knees properly.
The self-loathing and loneliness diminish when I get out of bed and try to tire myself. The Inner Chimp may be a sociopath, but he doesn’t seem to have been the mastermind. He’s more of a hired thug. This suspect can be released with a caution.
What about the earworms? I’ve suffered with these for years, to an almost comical degree.
It is a virtual certainty that if I play a song more than three times in one day, there’s a danger it will become lodged in my auditory cortex until the following morning.
For this reason, I now avoid some of my favourite songs completely. I have especially happy memories of listening to Vampire Weekend’s third album while on holiday in Ireland; I can never play it anymore.
It’s the equivalent of ‘just one more’ glass of wine – the price I’ll pay the next day means it’s not worth indulging.
But here’s a theory: perhaps these earworms are always playing, even when I’m sleeping soundly. Your stomach is always rumbling but most of us never hear the sound because the space is wadded with wet, squishy food. So maybe the earworms are always playing, it’s just that the sleep masks the noise.
Like my inability to get comfortable, earworms are only a problem because I cannot sleep. This suspect can likewise be exonerated.
At first glance, it seems unlikely that the earworms are caused by my wife’s lateness to bed, but there seems to be more than just plain correlation at work.
My wife’s bedtime routine is the opposite of sleep hygiene
My wife’s regular bedtime routine is the opposite of what is now known as ‘sleep hygiene’. It usually involves staring at a screen for hours before turning over and falling instantly asleep.
Tonight she not only stared at a screen for several hours but also consumed three quarters of a bottle of wine during her Friday night Zoom hangout with her friends. Then she climbed into bed (a full hour after I had done so), commiserated with me about my predicament, turned over and tumbled straight into the arms of Morpheus.
Maybe, alone in the bed, I was subconsciously waiting for her, aware that our usual routine has been upset. Maybe I was anticipating her arrival. Certainly, she bears some culpability for jinxing things and for shaming me so abjectly with her ability to fall asleep so easily.
But again, it’s a contributing factor. This suspect can be released with a caution.
The stomach trouble I’m experiencing is barely noticeable but – like a single midge buzzing around a foreign hotel room – it’s a sufficient enough niggle to ruin my night.
The annoyance is amplified by the fact that the hydraulic flush mechanism on our toilet has broken. While we await a spare part, every ‘modesty flush’ requires the filling and emptying of several pots and pitchers into the cistern – a simple enough process that feels increasingly laborious when undertaken every 45 minutes in the dead of night.
We’ll move to prosecute this suspect, in part because of the evidence but mainly because all of the other factors suggest that the victim is more than culpable in his own distress.
3am
I’ve read for more than an hour and the subsequent attempt at sleep failed. We were betting everything on this attempt, and it hasn’t worked.
Our missiles have failed.
HMS Thunder Child has sunk.
The cataclysm cannot be stopped.
God be with you.
The impact will be felt at around 8am, by which time sleep – sweet, blessed sleep – will fleetingly manifest itself. Tearing myself away from it will be so unpleasant, so deracinating, that it will feel like I’ve been ‘untimely ripped’ from my mother’s womb.
I’m ready to sleep now. I’m not tired of course, but I am weary. Most of all, I’m profoundly bored.
This feels like true limbo. At this point in the night, insomnia isn’t really like waiting to get into a nightclub, it is more like waiting alone for a bus in an unfamiliar town.
A trustworthy local has told you, has sworn blind, that a bus will come if you just wait long enough. You need the bus to come – there are no hotels in this town, just this one option.
But you’ve been staring at the same shopfront and humming the same tune for hours – the faintest trace of novelty has been exhausted and there is no way of knowing if you missed the service, it’s been delayed, or if the bus company even exists.
4am
I notice that even our neighbours’ kids, a quartet of twentysomethings left in perpetual curfew by the pandemic, have finally finished patronising the studio den at the bottom of their garden – the pleasures of online shooters and Netflix exhausted for every last one of them.
I’ve always been a night owl with the ambitions of a lark
I’ve always been a night owl with the ambitions of a lark – enthusiastic but probably doomed, like a 6ft jockey or Caribbean bobsledder.
This particular bout of sleeplessness has actually arrived during a period when I’ve adapted my sleep cycle so that I rise before 6am. Every morning I’ve been greeting the dawn in a monastic ritual of yoga and meditation before the rest of the family awakens.
Before starting my morning regime, I usually brush my teeth in the garden, scanning the nearby houses, on the lookout for a feint neighbourly glow that would indicate I’m not alone. Invariably, all is dark.
Tonight I’m looking out of our back window onto the garden, still covered in snow after a flurry a couple of days before.
No rooms are lit, save mine. If I stay quiet and keep my eyes fixed on the garden then, in a little while, I might be able to glimpse myself standing in the snow, brushing my teeth as I start my morning routine. I’ve lapped myself; quite a feat.
Digression to an embarrassment in Sweden
The inexorable approach of dawn brings with it a fundamental embarrassment: Why can’t you do this? Why can’t you manage this simple thing? Is there something wrong with you?
There have been a few times in my life when I’ve felt this way. Potential pitfalls lurked in any activity that couldn’t be learned or understood by studying it harder, especially if my enthusiasm for it was limited.
Like flirting, putting, or maintaining your balance on a bicycle, sleep is not an action you improve through lock-jawed intensity.
Nearly a decade ago I was in Sweden for a friend’s wedding. Viewed in retrospect, the experience is a tapestry of quaint rituals enacted by charming locals who seemed to have their shit together to a preternatural degree.
The wedding dinner was a case in point, enlivened by traditions that repeated at regular intervals during the evening.
Throughout the meal anyone could shout skål, and the cheer would be returned by the wedding party. Then we would all raise their glasses for a communal toast. Just when you’d forgotten about the tradition and become absorbed in conversation, someone would punctuate the hubbub of the meal with a fresh toast.
As a group of visiting Brits, it took us some courage to participate, but finally one of our group plucked up the courage and the toast was returned.
I was the only adult who could not whistle
At some point during the dinner, it emerged that I was the only adult in our area of the giant U-shaped table – and probably in the whole room – who could not whistle.
The revelation gave way to gentle ribbing: the guests speculated on how I’d missed out on this childhood rite of passage, compared their own whistling abilities, and commiserated with me.
Then a couple of friends took it upon themselves to start teaching me how to whistle. After 10 minutes or so, I was still puckering and puffing with no discernible improvement. It had long since stopped being funny or enjoyable but my friends were sure that a breakthrough was imminent.
I pressed the panic button. “SKÅL!” I yelled at the top of my voice.
The wedding party raised their glasses, locked eyes with their dining partners, and in the ensuing revelry, the conversation was reset. The whistling tutorial was forgotten.
I’m 40 years old and I still can’t whistle. Add that to the list of regrets, along with being a self-absorbed teenager and a distracted father.
5am
Here we are at the final frontier. I decide to try sleeping on the sofa in the office.
Downstairs, in the coal shed, the boiler loses pressure and fails to turn on.
I lay my head on a couple of timeworn homemade cushions and pull a throw over my head. I manage two hours of real sleep before both the dawn light and the increasing chill seep inexorably into the room.
Outside the snow remains, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the sunshine.
