The Illusion of Sleep

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

I heard these words in Silicon Valley when I was in my twenties. The phrase comes from Benjamin Franklin. Well, it’s a paraphrase of  Franklin’s “There will be sleeping enough in the grave.” I’m a lifelong follower of the Franklin sleep principle. There are 24 hours in the day. Why waste a third of them sleeping?

In high school, I listened to talk radio late at night. To Ira Blue on KGO in San Francisco. The radio signal traveled 1,000 miles north to Seattle to reach me in the bedroom I’d painted with a wall-to-wall rainbow. Ira Blue signed off every night by playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The cue to finally fall asleep. My breath slowed even as the piano thundered. When Ira Blue died just before my sixteenth birthday, my insomnia really kicked in.

My mind crochets a blanket of worries at night.

One of my sisters knits. She never gets further than a small square, the size of a washcloth. She says it’s a distraction requiring no thought at all. She gives away her knit washcloths. They are too precious to use.

Madonna apparently never sleeps. I read that on the Tuft & Needle website when I shopped for a new mattress. I ended up buying one of their mattresses for my guestroom. My guests rave about how well they sleep. Once at a late-night party in the Hollywood Hills, Madonna’s bare, pregnant belly glowed like a peach; her breasts heaved from her bra. She took my hand, laid it on the firm swell of her hard belly to feel her daughter’s kick. I lost a year of sleep with each of my babies. My post-partum sleep, a patchwork of night naps.

I realize it has been years since I have lingered over a sleeping child. The fermented air of morning. Sweaty, pillow-creased faces.

Now I have a sleeping dog. Curled next to my desk. Or splayed on his back. Paws clawing the air as he runs in a dream. Where is going? I’ve never known such sleep.

For decades, I have existed on an average of five and a half hours of sleep, the same as Ben Franklin. Like Ben, I have found sleep superfluous and even as I praise those that sleep in or nap, I secretly pity them.

When I started out in Silicon Valley, sleep was considered a time suck. Maybe I was drawn to Silicon Valley because of that—a whole place filled with people who functioned on minimal sleep. And really, think of the accomplishment—the invention of the microchip, personal computer, genetic engineering, the Internet, the iPhone. Steve Jobs slept six hours. Same for Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey and collectively those two have invented online payment, social media, electric automobiles and yes, chaos. But still.

Of course, sometimes I just lie awake, wasting those hours. Well, maybe not a total loss, I try to think through a problem or a conversation or action. Maybe it was a noise, a car alarm ignited, or the rattle of a truck. Or my body heated as if a teapot set to boil. I wake in a twist of bedsheets. But what now? Do I flip like a pancake on a hot griddle or lie there, mind whipping? Or do I rise and work? Doom scroll? Read? What?

Fran Lebowitz has a personal library of over 10,000 books. When she’s not reading, she walks the streets of New York with a sense of ownership. Lebowitz says her mother made her go to bed every night at 7:30. She blames that for her chronic insomnia. My parents put us to bed at 7:30. We’d have a children’s dinner, bathe, and my mother would read to us. Then lights out. My parents ate supper later. I’d fall asleep listening to the hum of their intimacies.

I often think how my children had parents that love them but never loved one another.

I’m convinced insomnia is hard-wired in my biology. When I was in college, I took a biology course called ‘Sleep and Dreams’ with Dr. William Dement. It was a big lecture class and filled a requirement and a curiosity. I had already discovered the power of sleeplessness, but I wanted to hear what the founder of the field of sleep medicine had to say. He lectured about the importance of REM sleep, which he had discovered, along with sleep apnea and narcolepsy. I remember the video he showed of narcoleptic dogs. When students fell asleep in Dement’s class, he’d point to the person and say gently, “Don’t wake him, let him sleep.” Thirty-six years later, my youngest son took the same ‘Sleep and Dreams’ class. During Parents’ Weekend, I attended the lecture on sleep apnea. By then, Dement had a designated student sleeping section.

Dement codified sleep into multiple sleep cycles that last between 70 and 120 minutes each, and within each cycle there are four phases: N1 is the few minutes when you start to doze off. N2 lasts longer as your brain and body slow.

The poet Matthew Rohrer wrote a whole collection of poems that began in this hypnagogic stage, what he describes as “you sort of lose control of your body and mind and begin to hear voices, and think ‘What was that?’”  For Rohrer those weird voices spoke lines like “He Seems Lost to a Partisan Girl” or “I Only Smoke Cigarettes on Your Rotation” and “If You Eat This Cookie I Won’t Let You Into Paradise,” which became the titles and first lines of each poem. Poetry from the fuzzy edges of our minds blinking off.

Next is N3 or deep sleep. Mind and body fully checked out. Dement said this was the critical sleep for mental and physical health. Then REM, which is where the body checks out and the brain is on fire with dreams. We cycle in and out of these stages. And then there are circadian rhythms which drive our biological clock and which get whacked by travel across time zones.

I use sleep aids when I travel. I started decades ago with melatonin. Then I had a boss who turned me onto Excedrin PM. That and a glass of wine on an overseas flight would knock me out for a few hours. I’d repeat that same concoction at night to sleep. Worked like a charm. Then I discovered Ambien. The magic drug. I pass out. No morning-after effect either. Wherever I fly, I jump into that time zone. Which means I may stay up 24 hours or run to a meeting at what would be 3:00 in the morning by my body clock. No naps upon arrival. That’s my routine and I swear by it.

In Paris, the Christmas lights and wreathes mingle with January SOLDE signs. The bakery windows beckon with Galette des Rois. On the corner, a flower stand is a burst of pink and purple hyacinths. I’ve stopped at a café on Boulevard St. Germain for a boule of café crème. I slept poorly again. I’m over the jetlag, but now the insomnia has moved in. I’d sworn I wouldn’t take Ambien every night on this trip. I’m here too long. I know how this goes. After a week, Ambien’s power begins to dissipate. The nights shorten or break apart in chunks. I can up the dosage or ride it out. I’ve chosen to ride it out and now I’m bleary. I’ve been here before. A few befores to be honest.

My love affair with Ambien sours. Not that I’m Eminem—blaming Ambien for writer’s block, wiping out his brain cells. This is not a nasty divorce. Just disappointment in my sleeping buddy, the little white pill I’ve come to depend on when nothing else works.

I travel to the mountains of Wyoming where altitude and adrenaline lock arms to prevent sleep. But I’ve got a new strategy. The first night, I take a quarter of an Ambien. It’s a spec, a bread crumb, but it works. I sleep. Two nights later, I up it to a half an Ambien. When I fly home, I’m fine. Then the pandemic arrives like a massive winter storm. We bolt the doors, lock the windows, prepare to ride it out. Will I sleep? Will you? Our days and nights blurring, masking time. I watch the world unravel. People are baking bread and dying. Seeding gardens and graves. And yet it is here in the wilderness of walls that I find sleep. Finally.

Until I don’t.

Marilyn Monroe famously had sleeping issues. The studio doctors prescribed barbiturates. They didn’t know any better in the 1950’s. Marilyn would lie awake for hours, listening to the world outside, her body humming with adrenaline. Eventually the barbiturates would take over. Someone would arrive to wake her. Late for a set call. She’d struggle out of that druggy sleep. Then perk up and perform. I wonder what she thought of during all those awake hours. The night dragging into dawn.

When I was in my mid-thirties, I lived near the house on Fifth Helena in Brentwood where Marilyn overdosed. Sometimes, pushing the baby’s stroller with my little ones looping ahead, we’d walk to her old home. In my mind, I’d see the coroner’s photo of her naked body slung over the bed, clutching a phone in one hand. Marilyn requested Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” be played at her memorial service.

I saw the Judy Garland bio pic with Renee Zellweger that won Zellweger the Oscar. I hadn’t realized that Judy Garland was an insomniac too. There’s that scene in London when she finally falls asleep, only to be awakened by a knock on the door. She calls out, “Go away, I’m sleeping,” but it’s her young lover and suddenly she’s giddy. She too died from barbiturates.

I once was married to a man addicted to Xanax and alcohol. I’ve ridden in the ambulance, the siren screeching. Seen his eyes freeze as if seeing another life. Before rehab, before he sobered, he slept all the time. Went to bed early, slept in, slept during the middle of the day. We shared a California king-sized bed. His body, a sea star. I held the edge as if it were the rail on a ship. Then I bailed to the guestroom, and eventually to another country. I don’t think he ever suffered from insomnia.

But he suffered. And I suffered although my insomnia sustained me during the worst of that marriage. Awake, I plotted a new life, listening to our neighbor’s racing pigeons over the fence. Their cooing calming, calling out to me: run. In the evenings before dinner, I’d run cycles through the park, beating a path out. I learned a lot about addiction then, and codependence. Deceptive, hidden illnesses. The secrets we stitch into our hems like jewels as we flee for our lives.

Insomnia first arrived when I was twelve and still slept in a bowed nighty and lace-trimmed socks. That summer I met a boy on holiday who gave me firecrackers as a parting gift. Because I thought I might like this boy and never see him again, I stitched the firecrackers into the lining of my suitcase before flying home, vowing to keep them as a memento. Their sulfur smell reminding me of the sweat of his slender body sitting on a beach towel next mine. At home, I hid the firecrackers in my desk drawer for years. Then one fourth of July, I lit them and amazingly they worked. Snapping bursts on the driveway.

Over the next few decades, I agreed with Margaret that “sleep is for wimps.” Like her, I muscled through long days. Like her, I worried about my children. But the resemblance stops there.

When my last child left for college, I slept through unbroken nights. After decades, I slept. I slept.

Google “How to get a good night’s sleep” and there’s a zillion sites promising “Top 25 Sleep Hacks” or “17 Proven Tips to Sleep.” Usually there is a list of do’s and don’ts. Exercise. Have sex. Lower the temperature. Don’t look at screens. Don’t eat or drink alcohol or caffeine within a few hours of going to bed. Don’t stress. Just reading these lists is stressful to me. They come wrapped with warnings on the importance of sleep for mental health, for aging, for everything.

At a women’s conference, the NBC TV doctor gave a breakfast talk where she claimed sleep is more important than exercise for health. As I listened, I regretted waking up early to get a run in before the session. Was that her point? Oprah, who is really good at giving advice about everything, says to take a hot bath. She has a big old bubble bath every night. Kim Kardashian spent $1 million on bedding. Mariah Carey surrounds her bed with 20 humidifiers. Stephen King insists that the open end of the pillowcase be pointed to the other side of the bed in order to sleep.

A college poetry professor told us to keep a dream journal. A more recent one said never to use the word ‘dream’.  I ignored both. I’m tired of advice.

My love says he makes his mind blank and then falls right to sleep. We had been discussing meditation before agreeing that it’s something neither of us could ever actually do. Then he pauses and says, “But I do something like it every night for just a minute of two.” He claims he makes his mind a black hole. He can’t describe how. He falls hard and fast. I can flip on the lights, jump on the bed, whatever, he’s gone. He sleeps like the dead.

I was with my father when he died. Morphine-induced. He was a big open-mouth snorer all his life, and even then, at the end. Until he finally stopped breathing. After, my mother tried to close his mouth. To hold together his still-handsome face. His slackened jaw refusing, we kissed him, gathered our things and left.

Vincent Van Gogh splashed camphor onto his pillow and mattress to sleep, the poison seeping into his mind like a dream. I buy sachets of lavender gathered from the fields of Provence, the fields Van Gogh painted lit by a rising sun. I imagine him before dawn, brush in hand, waiting for the sun.

My mother and one of my sisters have taken up painting to pass time during the pandemic. My other sister is studying atmospheric science. I try to write through.

Recently, my mother and I sat on a bench in a botanical garden for a long time. We watched the low sun trace the lime moss-covered tree branches of one small tree and the orange peeling bark on another with a brilliant neon outline. The air smelled of daphne perhaps? We sat there until the sun set and it chilled. We never found the source of the sweet air. Up close, the neon trees dulled.

Marilyn Monroe would have turned ninety-five this year had she lived. In her book of essays, Marilyn: Norma Jeane, Gloria Steinem imagined her as a grandmother pottering around with grandchildren and geraniums.

My mother has a map of the world with colored pins to mark the places she has travelled to. The places yet to visit. She worries she won’t get to them. She’s already lost a whole year to the pandemic and at eight-six, a year is like a decade. She has always been a good sleeper. Even now. Which is all the more remarkable as much of the world lies awake. Insomnia spreading. Sleep neurologists call it COVID-somnia.

My early pandemic bout of sleeping is over. The nights shortening in little ways, insomnia returning like a feral cat feeding at the back door. I thought we were over and done. I’d moved on, right? Drunk on the elixir of sleep, I hunger for it. Now the middle of the night yawns wide with ridicule.

I look in the mirror in the morning. Whatever took place at night stares back at me. The slow tic of time laughing at that earlier insomnia-powered version of me.

And now I know that chronic insomnia can lead to dementia, depression, hypertension and heart attacks. I know insomnia is no longer cool. It, unlike fanny packs, isn’t coming back in fashion. It’s over. But not for me. Insomnia lurks now on the edge of the bed, waiting. It’s there when my love rolls on his back, when the room warms, a dog barks, the wind picks up, it rains, there’s a full moon, a cat yowls or a bird cries.

Insomnia’s eager, at the ready to slip under my skin, into my blood stream. The hum of adrenaline hitting my heart, firing up my muscles, accelerating my breath. I know the adrenaline rush I’m feeling stems from my amygdala. That my brain is in charge of the chaos. Soon my brain streams thoughts like Netflix. So many options to binge, I click on memories, events and worries. The hours click along too. So, I start counter-programming. I play brain games. My cerebrum and amygdala play war, play poker into the wee hours. Eventually, after years of insomnia, I find a mind game that works more than 50% of the time. I choose a category, say automotive or mountain ranges or birds, and populate it alphabetically. It distracts the engine of my mind.

The other night I got stuck on rivers. Arno, Blue Nile, Columbia, Danube, Elbe, F, Ganges, Hudson, I, J, Klamath, Loire, Mississippi, Nooksack, Ohio, Potomac, Q, Rogue, Seine, Thames, U, V, Willamette, X, Yamhill. I started by thinking of the rivers that I’ve floated or kayaked, the rivers I’ve jumped off bridges into, the ones I’ve walked alongside in cities all over the world. What was the name of the one in Prague? The skylight bluing with moonlight above me.

Dr. Dement died recently at 91, in his sleep of course.

Sleep fails my love for the first time. He is new to this feeling. I lie awake with him. Ask him to read aloud the news from his phone. The radio of his voice, a blue rhapsody. Weeks pass this way. My sleeplessness contagious.

Commanding the computer, the student nurse-practitioner looks up at me sitting in a gown on the examining table, my feet dangling, calves white against the Smartwool black socks. “I see you use zolpidem. Ambien. For sleep is it?” She had seemed so sweetly earnest when she stepped into the room. Beneath her mask, a pretty young face. Now her tone has shifted. She is recalibrating me as I recalibrate her. Am I a pill junkie? I’d already lied about the amount of alcohol I’m consuming every week. For when I travel, I say; for when I am at altitude, I say; for those nights when everything else evades me, I say.

The waterfalls just north of here are spectacular, plummeting 270 feet in two massive torrents, kicking off 53 megawatts of hydro energy. I live in a state powered by hydro energy. My body is 60% water. Where am I going with this? “So, how often would you say you take Ambien in a given month?” I plunge over the falls.

Middle of the night. My body humming, my brain brimming with the tangle of stories I’ve told myself, jagged pandemic dreams, jumbled fears of police violence, a lost democracy. I scroll the news, I rise to write, to read. And yes, I swallow a crumb of Ambien. For a few hours let it cotton my brain, satisfy my desperate stomach growl for sleep. Let it deaden me.

My love and I return to the mountains. We are in retreat. As if the silent snow-hooded peaks can save us. I’ve brought a pillow from home to this strange bed in a house from the 1800’s. I imagine cots of snoring miners, graphite and copper beneath their fingernails, lining these worn floorboards. The smell of smoking elk. I drift off. Dream our bed is surrounded by a half-dozen police, crouched, guns drawn. Startled, we sit up. One officer motion with his free hand to lie down and shouts “Go to sleep or we’ll shoot!”

The doyenne of sleep, Arianna Huffington broke her cheekbone when she passed out at her desk from exhaustion. She claims it served as her ‘wake-up call’.

I am so tired.

Heidi Seaborn is the author of [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), the acclaimed Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019) and the 2020 Comstock Review Chapbook Award-winning, Bite Marks. Recent work in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Financial Times, The Greensboro Review, The Offing, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox and elsewhere. She’s Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com