Insomnia and the Many Layers of Sleep
Published May 1, 2007
By Elias Altman
I hate falling asleep, or rather I hate trying to fall asleep. Usually, it takes me at least an hour from the time I get under my covers to the time I actually lose consciousness.
“It’s so simple” – I whisper to myself like an amateur hypnotist – “just go to sleep.” After fifteen minutes, I get annoyed.
“You don’t even have to do anything,” I say. Sleeping should be easy since it’s really just the absence of doing anything. But it’s not for me. My mental frustration slowly transforms into physical discomfort: too hot, too cold, etc. Once that form of biofeedback begins, it’s really all downhill.
(Illustration by Mike Everett)
I try all the different positions like a recently-devirginized young man: on my back, on my side, on my other side, on my side with a pillow between my legs, on my stomach, on my stomach with a pillow next to me to act like the body of someone who loves me. Nothing works.
Then, after seven different rollovers (left to right, right to left, sometimes even a 180 degree flip from one side to another) and various attempts at blanket re-allocation al la Dr. Seuss (less sheet, more sheet, all sheet, no sheet), I’m pretty pissed off. The Feng Shui of my bed feels way off.
But what really keeps me awake is the thinking. Sleeping forces you to be alone, and when you are in bed, you can’t escape yourself. During the day, we have to do so many things that we rarely think about doing them; when we are most active, our thinking is pretty reactive.
The thoughts I have when I am going to sleep are the most honest. Those thoughts only spring from my strange mind – they are not catalyzed by a class or conversation. They are not even stimulated by the physical world. It is just me and my uninterrupted, and rambling, train of thought.
The time that it takes me to fall asleep is like a dream unto itself. My wandering thoughts are as uncontrollable as the unconscious dreams that follow them. And recently, I have realized that in that hour it takes me to fall asleep, I have my most reflective thoughts. It is at that point that I am truly condemned to think.
Zen Buddhists believe that personal revelation comes when performing mundane tasks, like chopping wood or gardening. This has to do with the dichotomy between monotony and spontaneity; they believe that since the activity is so repetitive, your mind will do all the real, improvisatory work.
The irony is that right as my eyelids get heavy, and I finally feel myself close to sleep, I come to some absurd conclusion about life. It will suddenly occur to me that Machiavelli and Sun Tzu had similar worldviews. I convince myself that I have a brilliant idea, and then I debate about writing it down.
The ideas always come when I am slipping away. Sleeping for me has four stages: getting in bed, general mental decompression, mind and body petrifaction, and then the moment when I actually fall asleep (which is impossible to remember). The process of falling asleep is like sedimentary rock and it’s always right around stage four that I have my ideas.
I usually delude myself into thinking they are profound enough to be recorded, and so scribble it down. I end up sacrificing all the gains of twenty minutes of playing dead. More often then not, I wake up in the morning and the writing is nonsense – illegible and foolish – but I keep doing it.
In general, falling asleep is like having an orgasm; when you start thinking about it actively, it never happens. So, I try not to think about it at all and just sit back and watch my mind wander. I don’t fight it anymore – it only makes it worse. And so I think uncontrollably and silently wait for that moment where I stop thinking altogether.
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