Not Sleeping
Dreams have no beginning, people like to say. As if this clarifies how the dream world differs from the real one. The same could be said about life: Who remembers the beginning of his own lifetime? Who can recall the blissful hurt of that first lungful of air?
I don’t remember when I began writing an essay about sleep. For months I took notes and scribbled brief passages. I don’t know when I began accumulating dream facts, sleep trivia, snippets from blogs, and quotes from sleep doctors, all pithy, a few insightful, but leading nowhere. Unless that’s the point. “Tell me what the role of wakefulness is,” said the great sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman, “and I will tell you the purpose of sleep.”
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Trouble sleeping? Here’s the official advice of the National Institute for Health: “Don’t lie in bed awake.” I’m sure this advice isn’t meant to be ironic, but it makes me laugh every time. Sleep—whatever it is—either visits you or it doesn’t. My wife Raina can reach under her pillow and pull out slumber in less than a minute, a trick she performs night after night. If I go to bed at the wrong time I just lie there, waiting for a magic trick that never comes. To block out ambient noise, I use a machine that simulates a steady rainstorm. But white noise can’t block my thoughts. I think about my blood sugar. About my credit card balance. My parents and when I last called them. If I was too hard on my son or daughter. Friends I haven’t texted back. Whether God is real. The washer that needs repairing. Whether aliens are real. The Oscar-winning movies I never saw. All the carbon in the sky. The fact that I’ve left no lasting mark on life—and this is my signal to get up, do something, anything, until I’m too tired to think any longer.
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In my research on sleep, and not sleeping, I learned that Charles Dickens was also an insomniac. Unable to sleep, he would walk the streets of London till dawn. Once, he walked thirty miles to his country house in Gads Hill. Unsurprisingly, he wrote about these walks, and late into the night, I read these essays, which are not his best work, but will pass the time if you can’t sleep.
In his essays, you get the sense that Dickens feels superior to mere sleepers as he wanders the gas-lit Victorian streets. I understand the sentiment. You don’t have to be a great writer to feel it. One summer night at 3 a.m., after I finished the last page of my first novel, I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to sleep. I walked down five flights of stairs to buy Cherry Pepsi and chips at the all-night deli next door. The streets of New York were electric-lit and vacant. It felt like they belonged to me. I shared an unspoken bond with the deli clerk who took my cash. I drank the Pepsi standing on the sidewalk outside. We were sentries in a world that had gone weak and still while we persisted. Eventually, I walked back upstairs, back to my empty room and my little bundle of words.
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As a junior in college, I worked the night shift as a student consultant in the school’s main computing center, a low-slung concrete building on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The “night con” job paid fifty percent more than the day-time rate, and I needed the dough. At the time, networked PCs had just become the rage, and undergrads across the campus would spend hours writing emails and talking with friends. My job was to solve computer problems—to fix the broken connections that people had just learned to depend on. Anyone on campus with a jinxed computer could call or walk into the computing center, and we’d get to work. Each night around midnight the phones would go quiet, and even the pushy business school students would pack it in. For hours and hours, it was just me and whatever I could find to read on the Internet. I loved the shift, loved the job. The world of the small hours was my jam.
In the morning, after the end of each shift, I had to go to class. A hard crash back into daily life. I’d enrolled in a cognitive psychology seminar not far from the computer lab. My friend Dave and I would always sit at the back, cracking jokes. Sleep deprived, my sense of humor was more off-kilter than usual. I was also pretty sure I was funnier than ever. Dave disagreed, but rolled with it, as friends do. As the lecture went on, I felt more and more detached from the people around me who all thought today was tomorrow—when it was clearly still yesterday. This is the unique reward for bypassing sleep. A way of looking at the world. A way to see past the norms, even if what you saw was blurry and giddy with fatigue.
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A teenager named Randy Gardner set the official record for days without sleep. He remained awake for an improbable eleven days in the 1960s. Gardner was a mythical figure for me during a youth full of night owl expeditions. He made my own bad sleep habits feel like something quasi-heroic. Perhaps most impressive to me was the fact that, even after he’d been awake for over two hundred hours, he could play pinball against the adults running the study—and win. There were some down sides too. Apparently, during his eleven-day stint, he also experienced terrible hallucinations. His speech slurred after just a few days. He was perpetually quick to anger. He couldn’t focus; he had almost no short- term memory; he lost the ability to count backward. Such is the price for immortality.
If you are willing to spend time late at night trawling the Internet, if you are avoiding sleep under the pretense of writing an essay about sleep, you can find many more stories of people who claim to have gone longer than Gardener without sleep. A woman named Maureen Weston stayed awake for 449 hours during a rocking chair marathon in 1977—a claim the Guinness Book of World Records recognized in 1978, only to drop the category altogether the next year. Back in 2007, a 42-year-old man claimed to have broken Gardener’s record, too. They are like sleep alchemists, these people who push themselves to go longer and longer without sleep; their ancient art continues to obsess them, even while it goes unrewarded, unnoticed. And what for? What are they—what are we after, when we are skirting sleep?
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During my last year at Northwestern, after I quit the night shift, I’d gather often with a small group of friends at Nevin’s, one of just two bars in our otherwise dry college town. We’d drain pints of Guinness or Bass ale till the final call when the lights went up and the music was turned off. We’d walk home in a small group, laughing and strolling past dark store fronts, down mostly empty streets, past a bakery already hissing out smoke that smelled of tomorrow’s bread. Dylan and Felise would peel off at their apartment above the pizzeria near the Metra station; Dave would veer off afterward for the long walk north to his place; Matt would part at the alley before my building; Shannon said goodbye at the courtyard steps. At last, I’d push open the door to my bedroom, dimly lit from outside by courtyard lamps—my rented room with its standing wardrobe and desk and trunk, and a bed, always a bed waiting, green sheeted and smug in the knowledge that, no matter how far I drew out the night, eventually, I’d have to come home.
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