Sleep On It: How I Stopped Bowing to the God of Nod
Here’s something my biographers don’t tell you: sleep used to keep me awake at night. For a time there in my twenties I’d sit up half the night reading books about the stuff and about all the sweetness and light it sheds on human life. The experts would tell me that –
Happily, I can’t remember what they told me, if anything. I seem to recall, though, that their texts were dotted with cautionary tales from history, just to give me nightmares. Titanic tales, you might call them. For if that iceberg hadn’t been asleep at the seal, then the ship of the century might never have sailed into the movies. Yes, that’s the kind of ‘experts’ they were.
I was worried, you see, because I seemed to be sleep-walking through life, unable to awaken. Something was wrong, I knew – I’m perceptive like that – but rather than blame my misfortunes on, say, me, I decided the problem was sheep.
Not sheep, but sleep. It’s funny, though, how often one concept invokes the other. Trust me, the link is more than linguistic.
Sleep. Opium of the masses, drug of the nation. Sleep. Superfine wool you pull over your own eyes. (That sounds pretty sheepish, doesn’t it.) Sleep. An alluring apparition you can have but not hold, and which shows itself only when your back is turned. Sleep. The word I keep repeating.
Shut-eye. Clearly, I was short of it. But how much did I need? In the end I came to a radical conclusion: none was enough – nay, more than enough. Sleep, I decided, was a waste of precious time, time I’d be better off wasting myself. Impressed by my logic, I wrote ‘Think like a bull’ on a piece of paper, pinning it to the wall with my horns. Then, in one extended sitting, I set out to finish the novel I was writing.
The sound I’m making now is the sound my brain made when it broke. Did I tell you my brain broke? Good, because it’s a secret.
Okay, it was a bad idea – having since heard about Operation Sandman, I now know that sleep deprivation is a form of torture, a fate worse than tickling. So, yes, I made an ass of myself, and, yes, my thinking was a load of bull. (My ‘novel’ was nothing to write home about either.) Verily, I had sinned against sleep and paid the price, my ship-like cerebellum being brained by the immovable iceberg that is science, or nature, or something. Unlike the Titanic, though, I got a second shot at going under…
Fast forward to the future, to the here and the now. My life is wide awake and fully dressed, even if my fly is undone. I’m a homemaker, a father, a husband; I’m the owner of a lonely blog. I am living, it would seem, at the coal-face of life. And yet (he writes in hushed tones) I’m still not completely sold on this sleep thing.
Fact is, I’ve had a bellyful of the whole palaver. Chased from the matrimonial couch by the late-season fruit of that union (a real little peach), I’m lucky to fit in twenty-two winks a night, let alone the full forty. Then there are bumptious beagles that bay, nocturnally, and an inner writer that mercilessly wags the dog – the Timm who tumbles me from my makeshift mattress in the early hours, so I can pen piffle like this. The wee early hours.
Sometimes, I’m just too damned tired to sleep. And, yes, I have tried counting to sheep, but, gee, they’re slow learners.
There’s a lamb nearby now, as it happens, in a neighbouring yard. A real one, I think, and not just an ethereal ewe sent to mock me. The little nitwit bleats mournfully at any hour of the day or night, weighed down, no doubt, by its woolly woes. Like me, the poor thing seems to struggle with sleep. Would some simple mathematical task help it nod off? Counting people, perhaps, as they jump through hoops? After all, what works for worn-out public servants ought to do for Ewe too…
See what I mean about sleep and sheep?
Chop, chop, I hear you say. My point, if you insist on hearing it half-baked, is this: the Sandman has feet of clay and the experts are dreaming – sleep just ain’t the holy grail it’s made out to be. Look at me. Six hours’ shut-eye and I feel terrific: I’m at one with the world and, best of all, the words are flowing, every one a winner. Enough said?
So here’s my advice if you’re thinking of bowing to the god of nod by going to bed early. Sleep on it, for heaven’s sake.
timm in type 