Boomerang

    There comes a point at which being tired boomerangs and turns into insomnia. I’m so familiar with this experience that it’s come to be an expected part of my night, something I think about as I face my bed: when will I find myself lying there, awake, unable to cross the barrier between that condition and tiredness? Because it’s coming. It’s always coming

    Imagine, if you will, the way you feel when you’re ready for bed. You’re in your living room, sitting on the couch, and you become aware that your eyelids are heavy. Maybe your head almost hurts, though not quite. Whatever you were doing to keep yourself entertained is starting to annoy you instead. It feels as though you could just click off the light and be asleep before you were even prostrate.

    I get that. Every night there comes a point at which I feel that. So I get up, and I go into the bedroom — this is a trick, by the way, which I had to be taught; for years I was an inveterate couch-sleeper, the sort of person who could be found waking up at sunrise in whatever room he had been in at midnight the night before, regardless of its purpose. Anyhoozy, I get into the bedrrom and I peel off my clothes and I lie down on the bed. And the tiredness begins to leak away. I’m not usually aware of it at first, though I am wondering when I’m going to realize it has happened. Then, after half an hour, or an hour, or however long, I realize that I’m just lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, and that physical sensation of sleepiness, the one that drove me into the bedroom in the first place, is gone.

    I try to read in these moments, but the funny thing is that I actually am tired enough that it’s hard to concentrate on things. Usually I default to an audiobook, probably one I’ve heard a half-dozen times before: A Short History of Nearly Everything, for instance, or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. There is a list of voices — nearly all male (almost all audibook readers are male, for reasons that could probably be fruitfully explored but which I’m not going to write about now) — that have slowly lulled me to sleep almost every night of my life. Bill Bryson, Martin Freeman, Stephen Fry, Simon Prebble: the men who read the books I try to sleep to.

    Sometimes it works. Sometimes I lie there with an audiobook burbling in my ear and I drift off and wake up five hours later and three hundred pages further on in the story. But often as not I lie there and think bad thoughts. I worry, or I self-criticize. I squeeze the extra fat around my midsection. I get up to pee a lot. I feel guilty about how I’m not reading. I read, but I absorb nothing. I become paranoid that the cat’s stuck outside. Increasingly, I worry about death. Mine, other people’s, it doesn’t really matter.

    I don’t have a very good perspective on death. I know I’m not going to heaven or hell or anything like that. I’m just going  to blink out of existence and cease to be and I won’t know the difference. But what the hell does that mean? And how can it be that that’s going to happen, and happen so soon, when I can’t even make myself go to sleep when I’m tired? Maybe insomnia is a form of death-denial. Maybe it’s my subconscious trying to get me to live forever.

    I so often wish I could just put a halt to the passage of time, so that I could stop worrying about how quickly and constantly it’s going by, and about how everybody I know is going to die and then I’m going to die and by the time that’s happening it will seem as though no time has passed at all. And sometimes, when I’m wishing that, I get up in the middle of the night, and write it down.

    Am I going to be able to sleep now? Will the boomerang whip back around towards me? Or have I just got myself pointlessly worked up again? We’ll find out.

    Good night, I hope.

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.

Thinking about the midnight disease.

It was in this man’s class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I’ve since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. — Michael Chabon, Wonderboys

I can’t sleep. I’m trying to remember when ever I could. I have a memory of a time when I could lie down and fairly reliably nod off within a few minutes, but now that I think about it, I can’t put my finger on when this might have been. It wasn’t in high school, when I frequently stayed up until 2 AM and then went to school at 7.45. It wasn’t in New York, when I saw the sunrise shining off the buildings of downtown more times than I think I can count. It wasn’t in Portland, where it got so bad that I took to bricking myself out with NyQuil and Tylenol PM. When was it that I could sleep? I can’t tell you.

When we were kids, my brother had these things called “night terrors”. I’ve never had them myself, but I can tell you that from the outside they were the most frightening thing you can imagine: he would shoot awake in his bed, in distress, desperate for our parents. I would go fetch our mom from her rest and drag her into our room, where she would try to comfort him, and he would respond in anger and terror, “You’re not my mom!” I can’t even imagine what this must have been like for my mom, to have her son deny her in fear, but for me, it shook the fundaments of the world. I was probably six or seven when these began, and at that age — if you’re as lucky as I was — your parents are the bedrock of the universe, the font of all love and safety and, above all, rules: there was a level on which I sort of believed that all the universe’s basic forces, like gravity, and heat, had been put in place when my parents invented them for me.

Like I said, I never had these night terrors, thank God. I was only witness. But I grew frightened of them, and I believe that might have been when I started having difficulty sleeping — when I started staying awake so that I could stay on the vanguard of these episodes. That’s the closest I can come to pinpointing their genesis, at any rate.

Too, I find myself wondering: who are these people who can sleep? It’s not as though I haven’t taken measures. I’ve run two marathons. I rise at 6 or 6.30 almost every morning. I take melatonin. Often, I dose myself with NyQuil, though I know it’s not healthy. And yet there I am, hours and hours after having taken to my bed, staring out the window at an empty street, refreshing a browser window with nothing new in it, wondering why the hell my body won’t shut down when I’m so damned tired.

Is it related to writing? Oh, I doubt it. Artful as Michael Chabon’s passage about the midnight disease is, beautiful as the sentences are, I don’t write in the night, and I don’t imagine things to write in the morning: when I’m awake, just about the only thing I do is wish I weren’t.

Sweet dreams.