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December 19, 2010

On Sleep

I was asked the other day how old I'd be if I didn't know how old I was, and I answered by jumping around between multiples of seven. Seven, when I had my first birthday party, to fourteen, which I skip on account of awkwardness, to twenty-one and its implicit sense of arrival. Aphorisms aside, seven is the age at which, in my mind's eye, I peak; my constitution generally follows suit, even as I sit here, about to abscond from my twenties. One week left - although I believe that one's twenties actually end at twenty-eight, an age followed by a twelve month grace period-cum-hinterland just vast enough to hush the knells of advancement.

Of course, try as one might, one can't help but become attuned to signs of progress. Some are obvious, such as the loss of baby fat and its subsequent redistribution elsewhere, or the thinning of one's hair (which I nipped in the bud early on). Then there are the more subtle shifts: a tightening of the skin here, a subtle ache there and the gradual and disconcerting recognition of one's parents in the mirror. All of these adjustments have crept up slowly, for the most part, and I hope that they continue to do so, so that I might acquiesce to them with some measure of grace.

There is one great change, though, which announces itself loudly and regularly, and which causes internal temper-tantrums the likes of which the seven-year-old me could only dream of. It turns out that I need sleep. That most contentious of bedfellows whose maw I'd shrug off without a second thought in years past has begun to exert some new form of mind control over me: I find myself not only needing sleep, but wanting it. I'll glance at the clock as the hours advance, quickly calculating when I'll need to cast off by in order to get a requisite number - a requisite number! - of hours. This is not something I'm used to giving precedence. In the past, when held up against myriad attractions such as productivity and careless joie de vivre, slumber was always the last of my considerations - until suddenly it wasn't. If I knew I had to wake up at seven the following morning and was asked to go get coffee an hour after midnight, you'd surely find me sitting at a booth as the sun was coming up. If I procrastinated on an impending deadline until the witching hour, the ensuing all-nighter wouldn't turn me into a giant grumpy baby.

These days, though, very few deadlines have the imperiousness necessary to keep me awake when I don't want to be. Often, they have the reverse effect: the more immediate and insurmountable a task might seem, the more swiftly it will drive me to bury my head in my pillow. I seem to have bidden adieu to late night fits of inspiration, to all-night fonts of creativity, to those delirious epiphanies that swallow hours whole. I used to romanticize such nights well spent; now, I don't even dream about them in the literal sense. Nor do I take solace in dreams at all; I've never been one to find in them a wellspring of ideas. I dream wildly; they fascinate me, and I marvel at their physiological and reflective qualities. I need them, but I do not seek them out, or look forward to them. There always comes that point, poised on the precipice of six or seven hours that I cannot define, when I feel a restless fear of what lies ahead. Not of dreams, per se, but of the state that facilitates them. "Of sleep," wrote Baudelaire, "that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger." I think I'm aware of the danger; I've just reached a point where I don't often feel like putting up a fight.

Another grievous affront can be found in the form of naps, or, as I like to call them, day-ruiners. What a way to upend one's afternoon, slipping into some dreamy halfstate that doesn't even deserve the phonetic silkiness of a word like leisure. Straight up lazy is what it is, and the hard consonance of that term is hard to shake upon waking to find that a day's best hours have waned. Napping is what my mom used to do while we children did our best to keep quiet in our play; now it's what I do, often in the company of my wife, on days when we've woken up too early and can't keep our eyes open, and so seek in each others' unconscious company the comfort of blissful coexistance. Which admittedly doesn't sound that bad at all. Likewise, I must cop to the fact that a great appeal of going to bed these days is the presence there of someone I want to lay next to, especially on these winter nights when we like to keep the windows open. I never intend to fully commit to the business of snuggling; I've always an equal mind to rebel, to kick my feet and get out of bed after my better half is asleep, to get back to work (but I never do, and in my inaction is a different sort of want. I might have once considered it a step back; I don't know that I'd now call it a step forward, but I suppose another thing one grows to recognize is the ability to think laterally).

I remember working on a short film, early on, in which we shot for 21 hours straight. I was nineteen. It was miserable, in a way - but the misery was of a charged sort. It was thrilling, once having done it. The accomplishment was tractable; I felt I was keeping a train on course over a long rickety bridge. I was briefly convinced that this was the best manner in which to work. Only later did I realize the folly of asking others to function under such conditions; later still that I decided it was too much to ask of myself. These days, I like to schedule nine hour shooting days. I also like to edit until I don't feel like editing, write without writing myself raw. I like to be paid for what I do. I run. I eat with a mind towards my health. I don't smoke. I don't drink too much. I try to be honest. I am, it would seem, a boring adult, and yet I can answer for each of these traits that make me so sincerely, and wouldn't have it any other way. And so we're left with sleep, a good night's sleep - the shirking of which is one last great rebellion that I feel, in my wakefulness, I can partake in.

Alas, those friends who might have called me up to join them for some after-hours coffee and conversation are all, apparently, just as dull as I am, and while I might at this moment, caffeinated and at the height of my consciousness, optimistically envision a long night of rallying against melatonin, time will surely tell a different tale, one with a familiar narrative and inevitable conclusion. I'll lay my head down at some point between midnight and four in the morning, perhaps thinking that I'm just going to relax a moment before resuming whatever I was doing (nothing at all, most likely) and seconds later I'll be out. I've never had trouble falling asleep, never been an insomniac, never met a desk or an airplane seat I couldn't make an immediate pillow out of. In high school I became skilled at the art of the micronap, and at work in the projection booth afterwards I'd find fifteen or twenty-minute windows in which I could knock myself out. On those long and winding nights spent doing more fruitful things, I'd rest easy knowing that I could catch up on sleep at work or at school. And there, it seems, is the line in the sand I've been searching for: at school has ceased to be a state I can count on; work is no longer a place that I go. I work for myself. I set my own schedule. There is no bureaucracy or institution lording over me. What has happened, over the course of these multiples of seven, is that my time has become entirely my own, and I have no one to blame but myself for sleeping on it. What I've diagnosed within myself, then, is not a symptom of aging; it's the result of doing things the way I want them done.

Which is a sign of maturity in its own right, and which is why the statistics don't matter much. I've read the studies that suggest that people who sleep later are generally smarter than those who wake up early; I've seen polls of artists and creative types whose median sleep requirement seems to be about six hours. I understand that as I get older, I can actually look forward to needing less sleep than I do now. Were I to revise this in 30 years on the onset of turning 60, perhaps I'd read Baudelaire's truism differently, and note that the danger implicit in sleep is not of falling into it - a childhood fear that still persists - but of failing to re-emerge. Right now, I'll enjoy the luxury of balancing betwixt the two. That, and the luxury of calling sleep a nuisance, calling it accursed, calling it all the worst names I can think of, and knowing that it'll still be there for me when I need it.

Posted by David Lowery at December 19, 2010 7:01 PM