Peanut Buttering

Escape from dreamland

I've been sleeping poorly lately. I'll wake up every one to two hours throughout the night until finally, mercifully, it's been long enough that I can get up for the day and feel like I've gotten enough sleep not to crash mid-afternoon.

My dad has long complained about this. He says it's hell. But he's seventy! Waking up all night is supposed to be an old man thing, a natural phenomenon designed to build camaraderie between elderly men and provide opportunities to brood and complain. But now I've got it and I have to think well, maybe it's not an old thing, it's a MY FAMILY thing, and The Gene has awakened in me.

For my dad, though, the frustrating part is that it's hard for him to fall back asleep. I on the other hand can fall asleep over and over with relative ease. Despite all the wake-ups, it doesn't tend to cost me much overall sleep except probably throwing my REM cycles into utter chaos.

But it bothers me because the more you wake up in the night, the more you remember your dreams. So when I wake up after one night of sleep, it's as though I just spent multiple nights wide awake on a bender. It seems like this should be a hack to artificially extend your perceived lifespan, and maybe it is, but no one is meant to live that much life per day!

It's not that the dreams are particularly bad, they're just... not what I want to be spending my time on? Is that crazy?

I love mornings because they're a quiet yawn full of hope and potential, a brand new day to seize to the fullest. And I hate the end of the day because it's the opposite, a gradual succumbing as our energies wane little by little until we experience the closest thing possible to death. We get as small as we can, wrap ourselves in blankets, squeeze our eyes shut, and obediently do as much nothing as we can, and if we're really good then we'll finally be allowed to go back to doing things.

It's the pits. But the saving grace is that as I tuck myself into bed, I have the next beautiful day to look forward to.

EXCEPT now you tell me that between me and the rest of my life is a wacky, temporally ambiguous montage put together by some two-bit HACK director who alternates between riffing on whatever happened in the last 24 hours, the same played-out themes, and midnight love affairs that never seem to last. And EVEN THEN, even when somehow that little director strikes gold and has me hanging onto every frame, instead of a proper ending the projector runs out of film, the house lights come up and I'm booted out of the theater with no re-entry.[1]

There's a quote that "you know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams". Well, call me a lover of life, because reality is much better than my dreams.

So that's what I've gotta fix my sleep. I can't figure out what caused it, so I've tried a bunch of sleep stuff just hoping something will help:

Nothing seemed to help, except the Melatonin which I started recently and appears to reliably delay my first wakeup by about two hours. So that's something!

Part of me is always sympathetic to the "listen to your body" line of thinking. Eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty, stop petting the cactus when you're bleeding. And that part of me wonders, should I just be listening to my body? Does my body just want me to get up at 3am? It feels crazy, yet apparently there's ample evidence that historically it was normal for humans to wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night, and that one long sleep is abnormal. The evolutionary argument seems obvious: who's more likely to get devoured by tigers? The guy who goes comatose for eight hours, or the guy who spends the night in a surrealist tiger-hunting training simulation punctuated by frequent, fight-or-flight wakeups?

So, I don't know. Maybe I'll listen to my body, learn to lucid dream, or adopt a polyphasic sleep schedule. Maybe I set askew my sleep thermostat as a teenager when I would regularly sleep from 8pm-4am so that I could crank out homework before school. Or maybe I'm wrong about sleep, and Peak Humanity really is being immobilized under a weighted blanket, blindfolded, mouth taped shut, ears plugged, and rolling the nightly dice for love-of-my-life dream and not infinitely-long-finger dream.

Yeah, maybe.

  1. And some jerk keeps spilling soda on my pants! ↩︎

  2. To be fair, this at least made me go from "waking up constantly having to pee" to just "waking up constantly", which I guess is an improvement? ↩︎

  3. 300mcg, the optimal dose despite patent nonsense leading to mega-dosed pills everywhere ↩︎

  4. To double confirm this, I also have at various points in my life recorded audio and video of myself sleeping -- because, who knows what you're going to find? YET ANOTHER oddly taboo thing to do. Sadly no big revelations, just the most boring eight-hour audio/video clips in history. ↩︎