To Believe Is Like To Go to Sleep

To all the times I couldn’t sleep.

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.

I could say: a spirit woke me in the night. A hand set itself on my shoulder and shoved — which, by the way, is what it felt like — to jerk me back from the twilight of unconsciousness, because it had something to tell me.

I wandered out of my bed, away from my sleeping wife, and into the living room. I found our cat sleeping in my reading chair. There’s a little stained glass cow lamp with a night light behind it, shining deep shadows on the curtains and the stuffed animals she caught during Mardi Gras. I grabbed a Sprite Zero, because I was too bored by the idea of plain water and we had them leftover from a crawfish boil. I sat here. I tinkered on my phone. But mostly I just sat here.

The psychologization, the chemicalization help me apprehend what’s going on by giving me a functional framework. But any framework, in any case, wants something. It gets you someplace. What’s interesting about the first two is that they’re almost inert like dead specimens you study. They don’t have a lot of mojo. The spirit waking me up, on the other hand, has got some unction and a list of demands.

I’m reflexively incredulous about this sort of thing. And yet here I am, acting out the ritual of a ghost. I’m writing this thing, trying to work out, with you, exactly what I was awoken to receive from it. It makes me do something physical in the world, not just sit under sheets and think.

I don’t know what it’s made out of. That’s not relevant, any more than I need to know what my own dreams are made out of. Nobody can explain the material constitution of my own consciousness, either, and yet I totally rely on it as the sensation of myself.

If you believe down in your heart only in the material metaphor, then you’re stuck believing something has gone wrong with your machinery when you’re sitting on a couch at one in the morning. Something needs to be medicated. You are reduced to a diagnostic cadaver of yourself. And so you get even more anxious as you feel the wrongness of your place. That definitely is also to believe in something. You can’t not believe in something.

I don’t want to believe that it’s a material malfunction. I want to believe in the other story because, for one, it takes me where I want to go. That the interpretation makes different actions possible, reveals layers of meaning, and organizes perceptions, and so genuinely says something about how reality is structured.

I’ll need to believe that something put me here for a purpose. Intelligence. I’m not going to abandon the chemicals and the habits and the things I have to do tomorrow. But in a humming substrate just below those categories, with much more beauty and much more power, you can sometimes glimpse that there’s a bigger pattern to things unplanned and unplannable. There is sometimes something to be discovered in the odd cut of shadows of a living room at night.

I’ve mapped the shape of this spirit like a blind man feeling out the inside of a cathedral. By blindly mapping it, I’ve both discovered and built it. I’ve confirmed that what it wanted me to get could be gotten. Because I got it.

I’m tired now.