"Where Hides Sleep"

Enough is not only about material things. The above is the title of a song by Alison Moyet. For the first 100 or so times I heard it, I actually thought it was about something called "hides" and where they slept. It took me a while to realize she was actually singing about me and my misery. My mind must have been muddled from lack of sleep.

I blame my insomnia on Ronald Reagan. I was 12 when he was elected. I lived 10 miles from the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It was the Cold War. I thought that any day, or night, the bomb would fall that would obliterate me and the rest of the planet. At night the thought became especially vivid. Just on the edge of sleep, I would imagine the flash and be suddenly awake. This happened over and over throughout the night.

It's not that I never slept again. I became a good sleeper in college; working out four hours a day with the crew team will do that to you. Most days I was lucky to stay awake in class. I took blissful naps whenever I could and still slept through the night (with textbooks under my pillow in the optimistic delusion that osmosis would leach the contents into my brain!) I also went through bouts of depression at a couple of later points in my life that had me sleeping 14 hours a night. Those sleeps were not so blissful, but they were sound. Unfortunately, now, decades later, even my depressions are "typical" rather than "atypical". No longer swamped with sleep, when I am depressed I wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. and can't fall asleep again until just before I'm supposed to wake up. That is, if I was able to fall asleep in the first place.

I am not depressed now, but I am also not sleeping. I keep books next to my bed that should help. Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living; A People's History of Social Security. Both are quite interesting and well written, but not exactly page turners. My eyes start to close. I turn off the light and blissfully sink down on my pillow, gradually over the next few hours becoming wider and wider awake.

Is enough sleep even possible? I have really good drugs that make it possible, but I feel slimy for taking them. When I know I have to take a sleeping pill to prevent a slide into complete psychosis, I feel like I have planned an illicit rendezvous with a secret lover. I get excited, looking forward to our tryst. I cannot get enough of my man, sleep. He, however, spurns me unless I bring him his fix. He's a drug addict.

I think, there is something really wrong with me. I think, there is something really wrong with my life. There is research that shows that humans are supposed to be on a completely different sleep cycle, falling asleep just after dark, waking up for a couple of hours around midnight, and then sleeping till sunrise. If I could do that, if my life in America today allowed that kind of schedule, would I sleep? Or if I could work out four hours a day again, would I be having this problem? Should I really need drugs to fulfill this basic human need? (Do men taking Viagra for erectile dysfunction ask themselves this question?) Will I ever have enough sleep?

The other night I slept nine hours without drugs. I will remember that night for a long time. It felt clean and healthy. The next night I slept two hours. Last night four and a half, only after an emergency pill popping. Tonight I have a date. I'll bring the goods.

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