Not Sleeping

He would get up from his bed each morning in the long hours after midnight, confused, sour with his inability to sleep, insomnia the curse of his life, stretching all the way back to when he was a boy and was still excited to imagine all the wonders and revelations he might miss every night when he closed his eyes. It never once occurred to him then that sleep might offer wonders of its own.

Into his middle years he had no recollection of ever having dreamed. A dream to him was a metaphor for the things people wished for in vain.

He was no longer quite so excited to be up and wandering the dark rooms of his house at three a.m. The wee hours had long since lost whatever charms they might once have offered. Every one of his sleepless nights would follow him into the day like an abusive shadow. He was unfit for anything that the rest of the world might have considered a normal life. That sort of thing –and he could no longer even imagine what ‘that sort of thing’ might entail– was apparently no longer in the cards. He was stuck with Mahler and Schubert and Ben Webster and Schopenhauer and three a.m. Not to mention mornings of blind, stupored misery hunched over the daily newspaper and pouring caffeine down his throat, desperately trying to goad his blood, head, and heart into some passable impersonation of a conscious and functioning human being.

He’d begun to notice a sadness in himself that he was certain hadn’t been there before, this dull, muffled ache that started just behind his eyes and gradually worked its way down into his legs. This represented a fundamental change in the character of his exhaustion. For most of his life his sleeplessness, as well as its hangover effects, had been marked by a confused, agitated buzz, a sort of hyper-consciousness. His body would be worn out, he would feel sluggish and disoriented, but his brain would continue to stir up its usual ceaseless production of static and sparks. It was like being sleepless and exhausted in a great, teeming city, with stimulus above and around him on all sides.

In his mid-thirties things started to change. He supposed that years of nocturnal living and around-the-clock consciousness of one sort or another had done serious damage to his mind. The nights would now pass in a muddled crawl. The analogy was no longer a teeming city, but rather a long, dark road in the country, the city and the old amusements of his insomnia reduced to a distant, impressionistic spectacle on the far horizon. The carnival had gone black, and he was left with the more abstract entertainments of the planetarium, the dark astral clutter of his skull.