Thu, 19 May 2005

something terrible is going to happen
He stopped sleeping sometime in his early teens. It didn’t happen suddenly; he would get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and just never go back to sleep, until he was getting a couple hours a night, until he was catching quick naps in study hall, until he simply didn’t sleep any more. He always assumed it was a temporary phase, like his short-lived interest in german fighter planes. He was still going to bed at night, as his body was tired, and he liked being able to listen to Pink Floyd albums with his headphones on until the sun rose. It wasn’t until college, and his first roomate, that he became self-conscious about not sleeping, and took to spending the early hours at the library, staring at art books, telling people he was staying at the house of some imaginary girlfriend. He met a girl in his rhetoric class, and after quite a bit of talking around the subject, he learned that she didn’t sleep, and in fact lived off-campus in a small basement apartment in order to avoid the sort of problems he had with his roomate. They began spending the time when everyone else was asleep talking to each other on the telephone for hours, every night, so that the process of introduction and courtship was greatly accelerated. Two months later he moved into her basement apartment, and gradually drifted out of being a student and into data entry. A year later they married, and moved into a slightly bigger apartment, and bought a cat. From the moment they began sharing a bed, he noticed she would nod off for a few minutes, from time to time, until by the time they returned from the honeymoon she slept solidly for a few hours a night.

When you stop sleeping, you fold your dreaming into your day, slight adjustments to memories and half-attended notions, so that the first conversations the two of them had were shot through with a giddy sense of sharing these daydreams, and the more they shared this material the more it became similar, sharing details and form and recurring incidents. For her to sleep now, he felt, was like hiding her life from him, so that she would pretend to continue the constant daydreaming, would recycle old stories and sift through online dream journals, but it was obvious to the both of them that it wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, and so he took to spending his nights at work, sitting in a spare office, staring at the wall. He’s convinced they’ll work through it, that she might come back to insomnia if they have a child, that maybe with the right combination of drugs he can induce sleep on a regular basis. Sure, I tell him. Of course.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #