The Sultan of Sleep

It’s incredible how few people seem to sleep well. I told my doctor maybe 6 months ago that I’d been waking up exhausted for over a decade, which if we dug in a bit might not be thoroughly true but it’s close, and she mentioned that seemed to be more of a rule than an exception these days. And I was thinking this morning while our internet was out about Classical dynamics, which is a concept in science that basically says that if you know the state of a system at a certain time, you’re able to know the entire history of the system as well. In the case of sleep, or rather why someone isn’t sleeping, I think you can learn a great deal about them if they’re honest with you about it.

I’ll play the test subject for a moment. Most of the reason I never slept as an adult was because I was terrified of the dark. I played it off to people as being stressed by work or some other thing, and to some extent that was probably psychologically correct, but the truth of it was that I had a deep, descriptively specific fear that something was waiting for me there after the lights went out and that never stopped after I moved out of childhood. The easy take is that a part of me clearly didn’t move out of childhood, but in the moment that didn’t help anymore than someone leaning over the rail of the post-impact Titanic and saying it looks like it was an iceberg and not Poseidon’s trident. And even now, the distance between myself and that creeping feeling could only be measured maybe in months and certainly not years. As it turns out, why you think something is always just about to chop you to death ends up being sort of hilarious to unpack with a therapist, and my current one is comfortingly blunt with her instructions for getting through it.

In the past, I waded through some strange conversations trying to get at what the root of it was and no luck. To spare you the details, I’ll just say that it’s incredibly possible to tell a specialist every single thing you can remember from your childhood that might cause current night terror in a pre-fire Library of Alexandria sort of way and have them stare at you blankly for a minute before being like OK well let’s start with some CBD gummies and see where that leads us. And frankly, that helped me more than anything else which I’ll probably be laughing about for the rest of my life. Just like, “hey I think the Creature from the Black Lagoon is trying to wreck my shit” and their response is just “have you tried eating a grape before bed?” and it works.

Another thing that’s helped at times is Max Richter’s album Sleep, which is 8 ½ hours long and meant to help you cocoon for the night when you’re feeling particularly claustrophobic about it. He also did a companion film for it, which I’m going to watch for the movie challenge and report back on. Sleep is a strange landscape in and of itself, and a reluctance towards it seems to indicate that somewhere an emotional bone needs to be set or reset. Or, maybe you just need some medicinal help calming down at the end of another day of peeking through the porthole at an understandably disconcerting world. Either way, I’m excited to spend a great deal more time resting for the remainder of my life and if you ever want to swap sleep notes feel free to hit me up.