I’ve always been an insomniac. Always. One of my earliest memories is of when I was about three or four and my grandmother asked me why I didn’t sleep at night. I didn’t know what to tell her, so I told her that when I closed my eyes I saw snakes. I don’t know why I said that because it wasn’t true and I knew it wasn’t true before I said it. I knew I had to answer her, and, asking myself what would keep anyone else up at night, The Four-Year-Old Brain thought that snakes were a believable answer, so I answered snakes. My grandmother told me when that happened that I should pray. I never used her advice.
As I got older, the insomnia never got any better. When I was in middle school I would stay up all night watching movies on a local channel that never went off the air. At midnight, their regular programming would end and then they’d start broadcasting these moldy-oldy, black-and-white affairs that I’d watch until six a.m. when the station would begin its broadcast day by abruptly cutting into the middle of whatever movie was on. Those hours of watching movies were only interrupted by the hour or so that my father took to get ready for work.
My father was a baker which meant that his days started early. At two-thirty in the morning the coffee maker’s timer would go off and the coffee maker would begin to gurgle and wheeze its way through yet another pot of strong coffee. At two forty, my father’s alarm would go off. It’s buzzing WHAH-WHAH-WHAH-WHAH was so loud that a neighbor once came over to ask my father to ask whomever came to pick him up at two forty to please not honk his car horn. She was shocked when my father apologized, saying that it was actually his alarm clock. My father would shower and dress in one of his white uniforms, white pants and a white button-down, short-sleeved shirt. His uniforms always smelled of soured yeast and felt slightly greasy to the touch no matter how much hot water and strong detergent and bleach had been used on them. My father would shower and dress and drink a couple cups of coffee and then he would get in his lemon yellow Ford pickup truck and go off to work.
I didn’t want to have any contact with my father, so each night when I heard the coffee maker start, I would turn off the TV and creep into my room where I’d lay in the dark while he got ready for work. I wouldn’t even read because I was afraid of his seeing the light on under my door. The darkness became a kind of talisman against him. I would lay in the dark and listen to the sounds of his getting ready and I wouldn’t get up again until several minutes after I heard the truck back out of the driveway. I waited those several minutes because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t coming back. After that, the house was mine again.
My parents, if they knew I was staying up all night, never bothered me about my sleep schedule. In fact, they never put much emphasis on sleeping in general. At one time I shared a room with my brothers and we were very, very young, so we would sometimes get tucked into bed. But later on, when the tucking-in stopped, I never had a bedtime. Even later, when I began to go out with friends at night, I never had a curfew, even on school nights. Both of those facts often amazed my friends who always had iron-clad time restraints imposed on them by their parents. They had to be home by a certain hour in the evening---sometimes as early as nine--even on weekends, and they had to be in bed by a certain time during the week. They risked some punishment, getting grounded usually, for disobeying. I was never in my life grounded by my parents. To me, it sounded like something that happened to kids on television sitcoms, the same kind of shows where the family ate dinner together every night and the kids never parked themselves in front of the television. I couldn’t imagine being punished for staying out late or for staying up all night. As a matter of fact, having to stay up all night was itself a kind of punishment.
Yes, I could stay up all night reading if I wanted to or I could watch TV if I was quiet about it, but it wasn’t that I wasn’t tired the next day or that I didn’t want to sleep. In fact, some days I was so exhausted that my eyes felt crossed and I was sick to my stomach with exhaustion, but each night I would lie in bed trying to will sleep to come and failing and feeling heartsick about it. It wasn’t an option not to make it through a school day, so I did of course, but there were some days that I was so tired that I felt stoned. I remember reading somewhere that the average person took seven minutes to fall asleep and I was amazed. For me, to lie in bed for only seven minutes before sleep came seemed as remote a possibility as sitting seven minutes in a forest before a unicorn came to lay its head in my lap. It was mythical. It was not something that was ever going to happen to me. I sometimes lay in bed for hours, sleep only coming at dawn if it came at all.
Many of those nights I did watch television, but I also read. I read a lot. I read and reread my way through each and every book and magazine in the house, including my mother’s school textbooks and my father’s extensive pornography collection. We were always allowed books and our choices in reading materials were never restricted in any way (except that my father did hide his porn in the closet and under the bathroom sink). I read and reread my way through Louisa May Alcott and Stephen King and James Clavell. I read and reread my way through Judy Blume and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read and read and read and read. Everything. There were always piles of books around my bed.
A love of reading and the intimacy I developed with certain books was one of the good things that came out of years of insomnia. I paid with days of exhaustion, but I am still grateful to have such a close relationship to books and words. The other good thing that came out of those insomniac years was a beautiful familiarity with all the hours of the night, the daylight hours’ twins that follow the witching hour into dawn. I know things about the night that most people will never find out. I know from experience, I mean, that there is a time when one day tilts against the next and that time is the true shift from one day to the next and it’s not midnight as people so commonly believe. I know all about silence and fear and how they respond to hours and how those hours relate them to darkness and to light.
And I know that it’s possible to function with any amount--or no amount--of sleep. And I know how vulnerable people truly are when they’re sleeping.
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