The Science of Sleep

    This week’s Freakonomics podcast was about the economics of sleeping. I listened to it on the way back from interviewing Jim Howell,* a local transport maven who had some experience of the Mt Hood Freeway revolt. Jim’s a bright octegenarian — not exactly what you’d call spry, but energetic, with a lot of strong opinions on stuff. It sas interesting to talk to someone who feels this stuff in his bones the way Jim seems to. Made me feel like a dilittante. Which I suppose I am.

*Not Jay Howell, as I wrote the other day — Jay Howell is a former relief pitcher with the LA Dodgers. He was pretty good, too, but I hadn’t thought about the guy in years before I noticed the typo.

    Though journalists are often called upon as experts, the truth is that dilettantism is in the nature of the job — what you’re supposed to do is go find out about something, and do your best to explain and/or describe it so other people can understand it. Perhaps if one were to write a whole book, that sense of dipping one’s toes into an ocean would go away, but I’ve never gone deep enough on a story to feel any other way.

    Anyhoozy, sleeping. I was listening to this podcast and, through some kind of weird mental alchemy, it made me sleepy. By the time I got home, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open until I reached the couch. This was at 11 o’clock in the morning, by the way.

    I’m a bad sleeper, and always have been. I could regale you with tales of the hilariously stupid nightmares I used to have as a kid — they all involved a godlike voice sentencing my parents to prison for minor non-crimes like running out of gas —, but stories about other people’s dreams tend to be boring.** In high school I had a clock radio with big green digital numerals on its face; I had to cover it every night with an envelope, or I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. These days I’m unable to sleep without a radio or audiobook playing, very quietly, occupying the part of my brain that is inclined to worry.

**Unless they are sex dreams, in which case they are fascinating. And ESPECIALLY unless they are sex dreams ABOUT YOU, which are both fascinating and mortifying.

    I was gonna get all analytical here and talk about the drawbacks and bonuses of being a bad sleeper, but you know what? Just listen to the Freakonomics episode, it’s more in depth and objective than I would ever be anyway. Instead, I present you with:

An Aleatory List of Sleep-Related Stuff

1. In high school I woke up to the radio playing a morning zoo show on a classic rock station. I swear that every day at six I’d shoot awake to Roger Daltrey screaming, “YEEEEAAAAAAH!”, followed by a series of clown horns and fart noises. Funny thing is, I don’t even like classic rock, as a rule.

2. When I lived in New York I used to sleep on my couch a lot. One night lightning struck the radio tower on top of Brooklyn Technical High School, which was two blocks from my building. I swear I woke up before it happened and saw the lightning spidering down the scaffolding of the building to the ground, but that can’t be right. Can it?

3. All the men in my family suffer to some degree from troubled sleep.

4. I never met my grandfather, my dad’s dad, Neil. It’s not because he died young — he didn’t — but because he vanished when my father was only a few weeks old and only once returned, toward the end of my dad’s senior year of high school. He promised to buy my dad a watch for graduation, and then disappeared. It’s from Neil that we get our sleep troubles. My grandmother reports that he would, when the mood struck him, lie down on the floor at a family gathering, drape a newspaper over his shoulder, and drift off.

5. She attributes this to Neil’s “Indian blood”.

6. I remember sleeping just fine for the few years after college. It was when I was going through a bad breakup in my mid-20s that the problems came back. I eventually got over the girl. I never got over the insomnia.

7. I once taught at class at the University of Minnesota despite not having slept in two days. Afterwards one of my students said, “Mr Jordan, that was the best class ever!” I remember nothing else about it.

8. I ran my first marathon on three hours of sleep. I wonder if that’s typical. I wonder if one of the many things that differentiates a great athlete from a regular person is his or her ability to sleep the night before the big event.

9. Who are these people who don’t take naps? How do they ever get anything done in the afternoon?

10. In high school I typically slept about 5 hours a night. I sometimes wonder if this is why I never got as tall as the doctors said I was going to be.

10.5 (I have a faint memory of a doctor who told me, when I was maybe eight or nine, that I would grow up to be six feet or taller. I suppose this is based on my height at the time, which was above average, if not freakishly so. When I stopped growing at about 15, still several inches short of 6 feet, I felt really ripped off. Even though I added another inch or two, weirdly, after college, I topped out at 5’9”.)

11. There comes a moment when your insomnia ceases to be about anything other than itself.

12. All of this said, I love to get up early. There are few things I like better than being out jogging as the sun comes up.