Prompts on Insomnia
Questions about 3am, not sleeping, and supervising the night shift
I don’t remember exactly when it started happening; the not sleeping. But I know the room.
Before we moved to California we rented a craftsman house built in the 1910s. It was very creaky, riddled with dust bunnies, and had a roach problem but… there was crown molding and a wraparound porch. We make the compromises we think we deserve, etc!
We slept in the front bedroom, under a little window we thought for a few months was stained glass before realizing, actually, it was a decal meant to look like stained glass.
This is where the pattern started: awake and alert at 2am, up until 4 or 4:30, then back to sleep until 6. Every night, every time zone, repeat.
I don’t fight it anymore. I’ve made my peace with this window of the night. Occasionally I dabble in a little toxic doomscroll, sometimes I get up and make a piece of toast with jam, or I listen to an audio book. But mostly I just lie there.
“How was night duty,” Michael asks in the morning.
I’ve developed a private connection with these hours, a volunteer on a shift we’ve otherwise agreed can just pass on by without supervision. Here, the world belongs to me.
There's that fragile quality of consciousness in the place between awake and sleep, where everything feels intimately familiar and completely unknowable.1 Sometimes 3am arrives and I’m boiling from the inside out with anxiety about something objectively ordinary. Other times I’ll wake up with an answer, or a fully formed idea2; or a person’s name in my head. Honestly, most of the time my brain is just doing banal admin, outlining what needs to get done.
April's prompts are about my fellow colleagues taking the night shift:
On sleeping and not sleeping.
What Mary Shelley called her “waking dreams.”
The hours no one else sees.
Negotiating with your brain to (please for the love of god) switch off.
The version of you when you’re alone in the dark, in between yesterday and today.
Wishing you a few winks.
LP
April Prompts on Insomnia
1. LOUISE BOURGEOIS’ COCA COLA
I love this YouTube interview of Louise Bourgeois where she her lists her current fears and how much space each occupies, one being how she is perceived, another that they forgot the Coca Cola she requested.
Make an objective inventory of where your mind tends to goes at 3am (or, in the minutes before sleep, or whenever your thoughts run unsupervised). Fears, fantasies, logistics, rehearsals, grudges, replays… list out what occupies the real estate.
2. TURNDOWN SERVICE
Sleeping with one sock on. Needing a light on in the kitchen. Two beverages on the nightstand.
What are your private sleep rituals? The things you’d do in a hotel room, alone, without thinking about it?
3. CLOCK #1
An artist friend, in a year of intense insomnia, began painting clocks; there is a mania in watching hours pass, one by one.
