The Murther of Sleep

Amber Wilson--"Sleep" (mp3)

MACBETH:
Me thought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth doth Murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,(50)
Chief nourisher in life's feast—

*I have a friend who can't sleep because of money.
*I have a friend who can't sleep because he's dissatisfied with where his life is heading.
*I have a friend who, like me, may potentially sleep in more than one location in a given night.
*I have a friend who leaves his house every morning by 5:30AM.
*I have a friend who responds to emails or Words With Friends in the middle of the night.
*I have a friend who takes a pill, or part of a pill, to help him sleep.

Talk to anyone over 35 or so, and they will tell you that their sleeping patterns have changed either drastically or gradually since the years that he or she used to go to bed, fall asleep, and remain in one of the various levels of sleep until it was time to get up.

I can't tell you when I last slept through the night.

That sounds like something that someone would say about a baby. "We can't wait until he starts sleeping through the night." Well, keep waiting, baby, 'cause it ain't happening anytime soon.

Last night, through no fault of her own (okay, well...some fault, from my perspective), my wife kept me pretty much awake from 1AM or so until it was time to get up. Actually earlier. I don't sleep until my alarm goes off; I wake up anywhere from an hour before to a few minutes before.

My wife is a cell phone junkie. If The New York Times sends her an update in the middle of the night, she'll pick up the phone and read the story. She thinks I can't tell. Like a child with a comic book and a flashlight, she thinks the lighted tent next to me can't be seen from the outside. But it can. But it usually doesn't keep me awake.

She's also an attorney, and attorneys seem doomed to abnormal sleep--the dark hours are the time to untangle arguments and to plan strategies and work out logic. So, she may well sigh or groan in her sleep, may even talk to herself (though more likely in the shower).

But that isn't really the problem. Just because something wakes you up doesn't mean, necessarily, that you can blame the rest of sleepless night on it. What I've figured out is that I have a limited number of "wake-ups" to use during a given night before I'm pretty certain I'm never going back to a satisfactory sleep. I can't tell you. I just get the feeling in my half-awake brain, like a kind of anxiety, when I've been awakened too many times and I know I'm done.

On a good night, I will wake up a number of times, maybe even check the clock and fall back asleep with the knowledge that I have several hours before I have to get up. I don't come fully awake; I just kind of readjust.

If it is not a good night, as in I have what feels like a big obligation or hurdle that I need to get past the next day, then I will go to bed a bit earlier, sleep soundly until some time in the middle of the night, and then, when I wake up, I know that I am up. At that point, my mind will focus on the task ahead and I know that I am not going back to sleep. But I do not get up. I will lie there and rest as best I can.

I have read somewhere that the best approach to sleeplessness is the counter-intuitive idea that I should try to stay awake and that this will make me fall asleep. That might well work, but I am afraid to try it, afraid that whatever activity I might engage in during this effort--reading, television, a game on my phone--will overstimulate my brain and doom me yet again.

It is ironic, I suppose, that as we get older and more tired, sleep flees from us more easily. But isn't that because our minds are clinging to consciousness more desperately? Or is it because our bodies just don't settle as easily, don't remain comfortable in the same position for as long? Is it because, as my friends and I like to joke, we've got "sin in our lives," a long-ago condemnation issued toward one of our ranks? I suppose it doesn't matter. Like an old, lonely person who suddenly finds a lover, we are simply grateful for sleep when it does come. Nor do we condemn it much when it takes its seductions elsewhere. What other choice do we have?

Sleep

The Smithereens--"Behind The Wall Of Sleep" (mp3)
The Electric Prunes--"I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night" (mp3)


My daughter, who is studying psychology right now in a college class, calls each week with her latest discovery or revelation. Last night, it was "We're studying depression. We're all depressed."

Sometimes she'll engage in a bit of psychoanalysis. I'm guessing, in particular, based on personal experience, that she psychoanalyzes each parent for the other parent but doesn't necessarily share the results. Which is good, because it leaves each of us with the still-impenetrable notion that we are unpsychoanalyzable, or at least beyond the need to be so scrutinized.

A couple of weeks ago, they were studying sleep, and when she called up, she unleashed this theory on us:

"If you have a hard time falling asleep at night, it's because you're anxious. If you wake up early all the time, it means you're depressed."

I thought I was off the hook. I had always heard that if you slept all the time, it meant that you were depressed. Now, it would seem that both too much and not enough are both signs of depression. Fuck.

Most nights, I wake up between 4 and 5 AM. My first year in this current job, the pattern became so prevalent that I named my Fantasy Football team, "4AM Angst." Basically, the way it works is that if there is one particular idea that can work its way to the front of my brain, I'm done for the night. If I stay in bed, I'm likely to toss and turn and try a new sleeping position, each movement giving me a new tangle on the problem swirling around in my head. If I can keep that idea from getting all the way to the surface, there's a chance that I can at least get some uneasy sleep. If I allow the very specific thought 'I'm not going back to sleep' to tread water, then I have 2 choices: 1) either tell myself that it is still valuable to lie there and rest during those remaining hours or 2) read. It all depends.

But I have a larger theory. I suspect that if you hosted some grand, impromptu event at 5 o'clock in the morning, maybe sent around a text (sorry, Billy) that read, "Hey, if you're awake, I'm buying breakfast at the IHop in 20 minutes for anyone who shows up," you would probably have a huge crowd of people you know waiting for you in the parking lot. And not just because they're freeloaders. I think the great myth of 5AM is that when you lie there awake, you are all alone in the world. I'm not even convinced that the person lying next to you or me is asleep.

Sleep is like trying to eat healthily. There's what you're should to get, and then there's what you actually get.

I hear that as you get older, you don't sleep as deeply. I would certainly agree with that. I hear the cat wanting to come in. I hear the cat wanting to go out. I hear the birds during their prime hours. I hear the dehumidifier upstairs, the furnace downstairs. I hear the noises of a house constantly settling.

But I'm not necessarily lamenting the situation either. Sometimes, it's true, there's a problem that I just can't get a handle on, but those hours of feeling awake and alone in the dark can provide the right setting for a lot of problem solving, examining, and even creating. In my head, I have written everything from talks to tests and have rewritten emails that I'm glad I didn't get up and send the first time.

Still, as someone who gets less sleep than he used to, I will offer one piece of advice: no matter how awake you feel, keep your eyes closed. That still gives you a chance.

The Smithereens and The Electric Prunes are both availabe at Itunes.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Family Reserve - Lyle Lovett (mp3)
Seal My Fate - Belly (mp3)

Sleep deprivation can have magical powers. Between an epic battle raging between a virus and my intestines, the juggling of two vomit-laden children and one perfectly healthy infant, and the stress of a super-sized work project, I found myself on the seriously short end of the sleep stick last week. My rough guess is, even with a few Costanza naps under my desk, I churned on just under four hours of sleep a night for a week straight.

To be fair, part of this is my own doing. Were I a wiser man, I would be forcing myself into the bed the minute all my childish things were put away, sometime around 9:30 p.m. If I managed this, my nightly sleep would notch up to a much more acceptable range.

Aye, there's the rub. To sleep, perchance to dream... or to wake, perchance to savor life and solitude. (I'll let you guess which line wasn't cribbed from Shakespeare.) If I choose to hit the hay the minute I've finally rendered unconscious all of the little creatures under my roof, I abandon the one healthy stretch of time in my day that's mine mine mine all mine.

The late evening is my vampire time, when I can release the selfish monster in me. A long list of things I love to do -- some of which I need to do -- can only be done after 9:30 p.m. at night while young children slumber. Many of these nights, the wife and I actually hang out for a while, which means most of my vampiric activity is on hold until 10:30 or 11.

Sleep or satisfy my bloodlust for movies, writing, music, poker, reading, etc. Damned either way, so Choose Life, right?

My love for these debatably important activities is so powerful, it often overrides my own logical acknowledgment that they are mostly shallow pursuits. And it certainly overrides my own logical acknowledgment that decent sleep is more important.

Lately my unstable, middle-of-the-night thoughts have been on death. And why not? What better topic when denying sleep it's due?

The Grim Reaper has been especially unfriendly to me and those around me this year. The tragic and unfathomable death of a student. The recurrence and metastasizing of cancer in another student, an amazing guy, forcing him to wrestle with questions of mortality and meaning most of us will avoid altogether. He's moved next door to Death, and although he keeps trying to put his house up for sale, move to a better and safer neighborhood, the housing market slumped at just the wrong time. Here's to hoping he can sell that damn money pit and move far far away from Death for 50 or 60 years.

More than these, though, my father's death in October opened the most cobwebbed and creaky cellar doors. It's forced me to evaluate my existence as the sole birth-son to a twice-widowed mother and the reigning patriarch of my family. "Billy" and "patriarch" are not two words that should ever be used in the same sentence.

Even if he was a constant reminder of what I don't want to be as a father and husband -- Dad was a very good man, don't take this as some "Bastard Out of Carolina" confession -- the end of his existence, of his inhaling and exhaling and sitting in that La-Z-Boy watching game shows and Auburn football games, hit me hard in a symbolic manner. I had lost my primary guidepost and cautionary tale of fatherhood. This loss became somehow more haunting with the birth of my (first and only) son some three weeks later.

I never wanted a son. Can't lie. Can't candy-coat it. My two daughters were exactly what I wanted. They were fun and beautiful and brilliant (hey, permit a Daddy his moment of pride), but they were just alien enough to protect me from my own hang-ups and fears.

But a boy... a boy... I was one of those once. I'm s'posed to somehow know more about them. With his birth came the requisite passing on to him my own fucked-up sense of what it means to be the Man of the House. And when he's a teenager, when he's in college, when he's got his own family, he's gonna see me as the symbol of so much that's wrong and right with Dads. The sins of the father might not be visited upon the son, but perhaps the sins of the son -- my rush to judgment of my father -- does indeed linger into his own fatherhood.

I'm frightened of my son's judgment. My infant son, of all the freakin' things. Hell yes I should be afraid of my daughters' judgments as well. A wiser man certainly would be, but I'm just naive enough, just clueless enough about women, to hold those fears at bay.

With my daughters, I'm unreasonably proud of the father I can be.
With my son, afraid of the man I can't.

My worries about his future judgment seem inextricably tied to my sudden mortality. Never have I felt more mortal, more fragile, than I have these last six months. Maybe that's why I won't choose sleep. Our fears in the dead of night are the most selfish and vampiric hungers of them all.

"Family Reserve" is from Lyle Lovett's fourth album, Joshua Judges Ruth. "Seal My Fate" is from Belly's second (and final) album, King. Both are available on both iTunes and Amazon's MP3 site.