It’s 1:22 a.m. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room. I can’t sleep. This is not totally uncommon.
Half an hour ago, I was quite tired, drifting off. Then, I was struck with an idea. I wrote it down right away, so I wouldn’t forget. And then I was too fired up to go back to sleep.
Reflecting on that now: in my waking day, I avoided the loose playfulness that might have afforded me a stroke of insight like this. I was looking at my computer too much, refreshing my notifications. I didn’t believe in anything beyond avoiding suffering and smallness. Any possibility of overcoming this was hamstrung by my own soothing explanations, which manage my pain but don’t point to a better destination. So as soon as the grip of my waking consciousness loosened on me, something else finally got my attention.
Now here I am, up at one and a half in the morning, when I should be sleeping. But I’m not too mad about it. I’ve always been a night owl. My mind protests: You need eight hours of sleep. You have too much cortisol in your brain. You probably need more magnesium. Early morning sunlight.
First of all, it’s interesting that none of these protocols give me the actual ability to slip into sleep, which comes so easily to any animal, even those ones bathed in LED lights. Sleep is strange. Sleep is a glimpse back into a lack of rational consciousness; a step beyond a veil where archetypes and strange TV commercials go to dance in front of REM while you lie there paralyzed. What is meaningful about dreaming itself is not any particular mechanism, but the meaning of the images, which themselves cannot be reduced to a mechanism without destroying their primary function.
Which also explains why people who are in general overly fixated on mechanistic metaphors can’t sleep. To sleep, you have to be entirely yourself, unguarded by comforting diagnoses and categories and strategies. The plans and the fears and the hopes and the frustrations all have to slip away from you, and so you just have to lie there pretending to “get” this until a sort of spirit of sleep smothers your wakefulness to death.
It’s no wonder we have so much trouble doing it that we have to sedate ourselves. We are diagnosed with insomnia. With that, still more categories, more frustration, more not being yourself. Less sleep.
I don’t have insomnia. I like being awake.
