Sleep

Sleep (or to not).

We’ve not really got on with each other for years. Our relationship all started to go wrong in my early teens. I was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to take an hour or two to get there, but I rolled with it.

University.

Not much better, although we got on quite well in the afternoons. He would enfold me in his arms for an hour or two when I was revising. But perhaps that was just perversity. After that, our relationship got worse. Often I would be tossing and turning until 3 or 4 in the morning. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but trying doesn’t work with sleep. In fact, it makes things much worse if you try. He wants you to succumb (or in my case doesn’t) not to try. I have tried all sorts of techniques – herbal sleeping tablets, various mental exercises, but none work really other than prescription tablets, and I can’t go down that route.

But now the game plan has shifted. Possibly for the better. I can get to sleep, but I wake up early.

Really early.

I am not sure when it shifted. In the spring, I suppose. Last winter, sleep was actually dominating me. Not a kind embrace, but a suffocating, stupefying stranglehold. I was waking at 11am, having a nap in the afternoon, then going back to sleep at 8 or 9pm. The pernicious beast was making me sleep for England. But, as I said, something changed. Maybe it was the lighter mornings and the lack of curtains. Maybe crawling out of the bereavement induced depression a little, but anyway I started to wake earlier.

And earlier.

Waking at 7 am became the norm, then 6am, then 5 am, and now an all time – what low or high? - 4am. It can’t be blamed on the dawn anymore. I have a curtain now I have moved into the back bedroom, and the birds aren’t so noisy out the back. Clearly, I have just developed a bad habit. Developing bad habits is something I am good at. Far too good at.

I have never been able to just sleep when I am tired. I sleep to patterns. (I am rather the same with food.) A rigidity that I hate. I also can’t stand being woken up by alarms. For years, before the 6am habit/addiction developed, I didn’t need an alarm clock. I would set it for 8am, but always woke ten minutes before it went off. I stopped bothering to set it after a while, but there was always Tom’s alarm. His literal alarm clock going off horribly early, but also his natural alarm-for-me system, his coughing, stomping around, talking to himself more than an hour before I actually need to get up was enough. I woke up 10-20 minutes before he did, lying there, tense, knowing that more sleep was an impossibility. Now, of course, the tables are turned. I get up at indecently early times, and probably disturb him. This is not a good thing at all, and I do try to be quiet, but there is some karma about it.

I think my father had a similar problem. He was ill from his early 40s – Crohn’s disease that had him up in the night, and he got into a pattern of getting up at 5am, washing up and feeding the cats. I am not sure when he started doing this – he didn’t retire until his mid 50s, so how he could survive doing this without his post-retirement mid-afternoon nap I don’t know. He didn’t get up like I do, but just laid in bed reading theology, or possibly thrillers, or listening to Radio 3.

But all of this aside, I like watching the dawn happen, like listening to the dawn chorus, but it’s a guilty pleasure, and one I pay for mid-afternoon.

This getting up early business is having a knock on effect on the cats. They now expect to be fed at 5am or whatever. They don’t wake me like they used to do when they were younger, but there’s no peace once I go downstairs if I don’t feed them… well Basil (the male cat), in particular who mews like the eunuch that he is until I rip open a couple of sachets. It’s not what I want to be doing, but mithering is involved if I leave it so it’s not worth waiting. Unfortunately, 5am is the hour of the dead bird (why can’t they eat that instead of pestering me?) which doesn’t add to the whole trying to relax-at-least- as- I’ve-not-had-enough-sleep thing. They will be three years old soon and have only just discovered the art of birding. Personally I definitely prefer the frogs. You can save frogs (although they squeal which is not pleasant) … and mice (and worms) but birds are a different kettle of fish, so to speak. Sharp beaks, the whole fluttering flying and pooing everywhere aspect. Anyway, I have digressed.

Back to alarm clocks. I think the 4am awakening is the ‘nature’ equivalent of waking up before an alarm goes off. The new descent into insomnia hell involves me waking up 10 minutes before dawn, regardless of the fact that I can’t actually see the dawn. Although I suppose I can hear it.

Perhaps I need one of those total immersion tanks, but then I would just wake up panicking about what time it was and not get back to sleep, plus it would be wet. And claustrophobic. And the cats wouldn't like it. Although then at least they probably wouldn’t pester me for food, and Lily-cat wouldn’t jump on my chest with her ‘make herself heavy’ thump.

The best insomniac times have been abroad when I can pretend that the time zone change is to blame. The excuse sort of washed in New York and Tokyo, but Paris… who am I kidding? Anyway all of these involved my being up at in appropriate times, sitting cross legged on the floor of more or less large rooms. (Japan large, New York small, and needless to say, Paris very small.) I was seriously, and as I said unjustifiably out of synch in Paris. I woke up in the early hours. It was hard to know what time it was. The street lights deprived the night of its darkness; a dirty brown twilight ever pervading, confusing birds that sang all night. The windows obscured by ‘black out blinds’ - blinds that are designed now to keep the light out rather than to stop it escaping, but they couldn’t altogether stop the light getting in, their perimeters outlined by a halo of fluorescent glow. I lay there, then moved to the floor waiting for a dawn that it seemed would never come, longing to go out, but afraid to do so in the dark, on my own. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of. And eventually I convinced myself that I should go, escape the claustrophobia of the tiny Parisien hotel room.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be invisible, or, at least, to have some power, some immunity, that meant that one did not need to fear others. What it would be like to walk out into night, at any time, anywhere, knowing that, at worst, one could be hurt, that one could not be mortally wounded or killed. Would that work? Would knowing that death was impossible be enough to make one fearless? Would it make life better or worse? Would one seek new ‘edges’ to make life worth while?

Interesting, but not really an option.

I hadn’t eaten for days. I knew it as stupid, but every time I tried, I just found that I couldn’t, and now, at last, I craved food, I craved a buttery croissant, but, ironically, although it was 7am ( I checked the clock in the hotel lobby), nowhere seemed to be open. Typical. So instead, I just wandered around and around, and, eventually, found myself at the gates of the Jardin de Luxembourg. It was still dark.

It would seem that I can never get used to how late it gets light in France in the morning in the winter. This sentiment is one I more assocciate with driving through Normandy at 8am, in winter, amazed that almost everyone must have to go to work in the dark. Although being brought up in the north, setting off for school in the dark in the winter was the norm, so maybe it shouldn't feel strange, but that was (quite) a while back.
But in this instance in Paris... strange white statues, menacing marble women loomed out of the half-light in the Jardin. It always surprises me how pompous Paris can be. Not as bad as Berlin, it seems, maybe not as bad as London, but I am never up in my home town, place of residence at any rate, at this time in the morning, in this state of mind.

I sat down on a metal chair next to a large pond. Dawn was on the cusp of finally happening now, and the seagulls were hopping along the ground comically. I knew that if Tom woke and found me not there he would be angry – angry, not worried – and I also knew that he wouldn’t wake before I got back. I could take coffee in Les Deux Magots, linger over patisserie, and he still wouldn’t be awake when I got back. It was tempting, but I didn’t like to look so far forward. I had got used to these unwarranted, unelicited, jet-lag hours that I had taken to keeping of late. I wanted to savour this.

There were a surprising number of joggers in the park, I noted. I hadn’t thought of the French as a nation particularly partial to participating in this pastime. Although I suppose there must be some way that the women stay so thin and manage to eat so much. Had to be that or the fags. Or maybe a one meal a day regime.

I resented their arrival, having been the first person there, the only person there for some time, apart from the gendarme who had told me off for moving my metal chair from its allotted location to one nearer the pond sothat I could observe the ducks better.

Anyway, that’s the Parisian insomnia escapade.

Tokyo.
Sitting huddled by the window of our 13th floor room. Tom had sensibly gone to bed early, while I sat watching the city fall asleep surprisingly early, ironically regaining my desire to write after a 15 year lull. Ironically, because there wasn’t enough light to see by to do so.

New York, listening to music and again trying to write in a lighting-challenged environment.

These really should be bad memories, but they aren’t.

Perhaps that is part of the problem. I actually rather like being up when I shouldn’t be. I like the solitude, the privacy, even if there is a snoring soundtrack going on in the background.

So possibly no cure for insomnia.