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.