Regardless, in this bed-mode, surrounded by such states, in want of some kind of recognizable evening routine — and knowing too that in expectation of that incidental nod-off it will almost always never work — the designated sleep space often becomes alter-charged, looming with its years of shaking every evening regardless of how gone. In bed, after the combination, I will flip back and forth from side to side and on my back and at some point onto my chest, a necessary cycle in the spinning though I never fall sleep on my chest and any time spent that way is just more time circled, though I still usually at least have to test the position each night at least for a few minutes, all positions must be tested, all limbs adjusted in their minor manners unto each set of new vortices and folds, and meanwhile, inside, my brain rolled on again for its own stable condition therein floating in the void wherein my center’s hid, the brain inside my brain knowing that by now it is at the very least 3:30, which is thirty minutes from the last time that I thought about the time, and thirty minutes less now even from the time I’ll have to do anything tomorrow, less still from what I had when I thought about it last, and it’s probably later than that already really, which means tomorrow is already even worse and quickly ending before it’s even started and I still am nowhere near to sleep.
By the end, most nights, in my attempts at locating the drift position, I finalize turned up flat on my back, though I will most often wind up turning again onto my left side before actually sleeping, the final click into the lock. This interim on-my-back period is a good period when I find it, as in it, post-commotion, I actually will begin to find the first kernels of the nothing, the true nothing in which there is a silence, and in which one of the remaining doors leads into sleep. Beginning on the back, though, rarely works right: part of its feeling right, nightly, is the unfurling, the sprawl. Each night I still must find the door to sleep among the other doors remaining, the doors which lead back into more recursive thought, though at least knowing that the sleep door is there and potentially ready to be opened brings some rhythm to my pause — a series of infinite undoings, rebecomings, so Thomas Bernhard: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth.”
If this all sounds ridiculous — this flopping, this awful waddle for what could be such a simple key — that’s because it is ridiculous — it’s self-created, really, though of a self not specifically the self — instead it is the self in congregation, the sets of sets of strands of images, ideas. It comes on from no center, in a chorus with no specific off-switch or delete. It is in the muddle of my blood — a blue lining in my body that cannot be shot or taught away, but simply slipped from, somehow. There are practices one might be suggested into — methods, medications, breathing, exercises, studies, more machines — which might work, but often too in overfocus can become part of the problem, in the mill.
It’s hardly helpful to hear science say I’m not alone. Sleep onset latency caused by “busy brain” is often named the most common form of insomnia complaint, if, among each person, a wholly different ream of concerns. From a study conducted in 1979, the year I was born:
(1) A.W. was a 37-year-old man suffering from very severe anxiety, referred for treatment of chronic guilt ruminations concerning both real events and unrealistic worries from his past life. He was constantly fearful of having given people “wrong information” and showed a variety of compulsive checking behaviors…
(2) B.E. was a 27-year-old man referred for treatment of ruminations about death, hell, evil and disease, and traumatic fantasies about a car accident he had witnessed 10 months previously. Anxiety-arousal included letterwriting without checking the envelopes for harmful material before sealing them, and writing literally damning phrases about the therapist (e.g. “go to Hell”).
(3) J.T. was a 40-year-old man who was obsessed with the need to verbalise covertly all the possible arguments for and against most of the decisions of his daily life. He had recorded many of these arguments on long rolls of paper lest he forget the exact words involved.58
Each of these three example patients was included in a thought-stopping study where they were taught methods for supplanting their anxiety thoughts with other thoughts and modes of relaxation. Of the three, results found no improvement in subject one and, in vast contrast, a marked improvement in subject two’s ability to control his thinking. The third “could not be contacted.” These widely scattered results demonstrate even more directly the wide and infinitely personalized effects and measures in one’s personal coping with sleep disruption, making the very manner of prescription, aid search, and so on more of a crapshoot, a waddling in the dark.
Though for some stretches I might find a long way out of this serial condition for weeks or months in passing — somehow slipped around the ledge into the lake of something if still not seamless, more at ease — it always seems at some point to return full bore within some stretch, as if at all times waiting just above me, falsely unprisoned — as if never fully gone.
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In the documentary Derrida, Jacques Derrida talks very specifically about the extreme terror he sometimes feels in the half-sleep between waking and sleeping, a space wherein his mind questions the aggressive or “new” things he has written during that day, challenging them as inadmissible, horrendous, offensive, despite the fact that when he is writing them he feels confident, capable of all. He explains this odd duality by saying he believes he is actually less conscious during the creation period, more asleep, and it is only when he is half asleep, toward the exit, that his panic, fear — what he refers to herein as truth—is stoked, manifested, revealed, screaming, “Stop everything! Burn your papers!” Thus this between area seems more public than the creative shell, more vulnerable, if also somehow more strongly connected to waking contexts, as if the writing itself is where the author, in want of speaking from the unknown, the nowhere, is channeling the deeper state, the lock of sleep. The self, in becoming aware of the self overridden by existing half in one consciousness, half in the other, begins hates the self for what it does not know about its other — hates its production, fears the new. This kind of inverse relation, in my own body, often leaves me feeling as if I am more truly awake when I am asleep, and more asleep when I’m awake — opening the question of who in me or through me is doing the writing, and who in me or not in me is the one to which other people speak.