What's that all about eh? Do you ever do that? Sleep? Do that, do you? Lie down in the dark, approximating the resting pose of a corpse, feeling your heartbeat slowing, slowing, every breath becoming shallower, until, eventually, everything fades to black as your consciousness ebbs away, and you gradually disappear into the waiting nothingness, not knowing whether you will see another dawn?...That? Do you do that? Do you? Shit isn't it?
Yeah. Lovely, lovely sleep.
So, sleeping is something I have never had an aptitude for. As a baby I slept for no more than 4 hours a night, which is all I apparently required to be fully recharged for a heavy day of screaming & screaming & screaming & screaming (because, I clearly had the world sussed for a terrifying pisspool even at that young age. I was a very smart baby). For some reason though, my parents seemed to be of the opinion that 4 hours sleep a night was, like, half of what they needed to be able to function in a way that didn't make them want to kill me. I mean, we la-ha-ha-ha-ugh about it now...
So I got off to kind of a bad start with sleep from the very beginning and it only got worse from there.
I mean, as a kid I would sit up into the early hours reading. My mum cottoned on pretty fast that you can't yell a kid to sleep, so to save herself the stress of fighting me into my bed every evening, she'd rather let me get on with doing something vaguely constructive with my nights. Sadly, however, what I was actually doing a lot of the time was something not all that constructive. Like, instead of reading some improving tome, I'd be sitting with my copy of What?Where?How?WhY? on my lap, staring at a drawing of a policeman trying to rescue a boy from quicksand and freaking the fuck out. Or reading that copy of Jaws I pinched from Louise Austin's house and freaking the fuck out. Or reading the bit in my book about space that covered the big bang & wondering what existed before anything existed and FREAKING. THE. FUCK. OUT (or sometimes I'd just pretend the periodic table in my Junior Pear's Encyclopaedia was a computer...You know...like Penny from Inspector Gadget had ah forget it).
So, when I did finally fall asleep it was frequently into that uneasy, vaguely sweaty, twilight place of anxiety dreams & existential nightmares that I, being like 8 or whatever, was not equipped to deal with. All of which meant I was never all that keen to go back & visit the world of sleep & I'd try that bit harder to stay awake the next night.
As a teenager, my brain tended to sulk all night & refuse to let me go to sleep because that's what they want you to do, those bastards or whatever. Plus, you know, the angst & the hormones. Oh my aching parts, the hormones! And by the time I was a student (hoho) I found I could only sleep, entirely coincidentally of course, during those parts of the day when I was supposed to be attending a lecture or a seminar. Or sometimes an exam. In fact the only way I ever got to sleep at night was with a heady mix of John Peel, Happy Shopper wine & cheap, incomprehensibly subtitled Bollywood films. My dreams, though, were fucking magnificent.
For me, being up all night though is like getting to have a 2nd, secret life. Nowadays my daytime existence is pretty much empty & entirely without purpose or direction. But at night, I feel a bit more me. As though after dark I can relax, stop pretending to people that I am in any way not full to the brim with crazy & just get on with stuff. Especially what with that internet. And especially on the twitter there. Where once I'd have to lie in bed with a walkman tuned to whatever poor bastard had the radio 1 graveyard shift to feel less alone, now I can watch all those others who are unconsciously challenged tweet their strange thoughts & bizarre Star Trek episode recaps...no that's me isn't it? In a way, though, it's also worse, having an audience for your insomnia. Because in the olden days of no internet & television close downs there really wasn't much else to do at night except try to sleep. So I'd try really bloody hard, out of pure fucking boredom if nothing else. But now, I get into bed, lean back slightly, decide it's not worth lying the full way down because I'm clearly not tired & get back to tweeting shit about how Sleep is a total bastard & one time I touched Robbie Williams.
These days I feel as though not sleeping has more to do with wanting to wring as much time out of each day as I can, in case something happens & I miss it by being asleep (that & wanting to avoid the hours of quiet panic that lying alone in the dark with just my brain to talk to causes. My brain is a complete shit most of the time). Like I am choosing not to sleep.
It's as though by going to sleep I am admitting defeat somehow, that I have lost at...something. Life, possibly. When I go to sleep at night I am admitting that today was yet another day like all the others, a day where I haven't achieved anything. A day where I've moved a bit closer to death by forgetting to do any living. A day where I have sat & waited, instead of getting up & doing. And so long as I'm still awake, there's still a chance...
And, yes, I may hallucinate terrifying black shades trying to grab me from time to time. And, yes, the headaches after a prolonged period of no sleep are quite the motherfucker. But being bad at sleep can have it's advantages. I mean, there are things that you only know about if you don't/can't sleep at night. Sometimes, I like to open a window around 4am & listen to the outside. Because 4am is the moment when the world seems to slow to almost nothing (well obviously not the whole world, I mean, I have heard of time zones, I'm not a monster). 4am is the day at it's magical best. It's generally too late for people to be coming home from anywhere & still too early for them to be going out anywhere. Even the birds, who seem to worship, via the medium of shrieking, the streetlights in my road as some weirdly uniform pantheon of gods every other hour of the night, even they knock it off for a few moments.
And the quiet lasts barely any time at all but sometimes it's so still you can feel the silence settling on your skin.
And then the Lord Chief Rabbi of the birds starts squawking that it's time to get back to shouting praise at the streetlights & the moment fades. The traffic picks up, lights go on & the whole, terrible business of another day on earth starts over again.
But you won't know about that, you sleepers. That's just for us night people.
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