The wild sleep chase
Three in the morning, wide awake, counting sheep into the thousands. A record, a book, and the bakers’ radios arriving at last like a lullaby.
I can’t sleep.
I try everything. I count sheep. One. Two. Three. Four thousand. After that I stop. My mind reels at the significance of owning a dream sheep farm. The money, the noise, all that sheep poop…
I feel like an inhabitant of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude who succumbs to the insomnia plague. Maybe if I wrote down the names and purposes of the things in my apartment I would get a good night’s sleep. For example:
Stereo. To play new CDs from new bands that sound like old CDs from old bands, check. TV. To watch reality shows that are so unrealistic, check. (You put a camera in front of people’s faces and you expect them to behave normally?) Refrigerator. To contain half-eaten burgers that mutate into a higher form of being (called Frankenbeef who would hunt me down to the far ends of the North Pole), check. Toilet. To aid in all that philosophizing and other etceteras, check. Bed. Uh. What do you do in a bed again, aside from it becoming a repository of sweat, potato chip bits and world-weariness?
I toss and turn thinking what’s the best album to play during bouts of insomnia. Is it Chick Corea and Gary Burton’s Crystal Silence, which is as noisy as hurrying light, or clouds colliding with airplane exhaust? No. The vibes are too engaging. Maybe Tortoise’s “Millions Now Living Will Never Die.” More like “Someone Now Living Will Never Sleep.” Music (characterized by electronic sampling and manipulation) from this Chicago instrumental band darts into ears and stays there. Languidly, like a text message from the afterworld. What about classical music? Chopin’s nocturnal piano ruminations or Paganini’s blitzkrieg bop of violins, perhaps? Too fascinating, too intriguing. Like the sound of heaven unfastening. No dice.
Should I reread Anna Karenina just like the character in Haruki Murakami’s short story aptly titled Sleep? Should I wander down the pier at an ungodly hour when even deities are cuddling their stuffed bunnies in their pajamas, counting cosmic sheep? No way.
Somebody once told me to read a Calculus book or the phone directory to bore myself to sleep. The tidbit of wisdom came from a person who usually dozed off in the middle of a gripping Alan Moore graphic novel (like Watchmen or From Hell), so I didn’t take his advice.
Years ago, my luckless band and I played a gig in Batangas and we all were smitten by one particular girl. My friend got her cell phone number and sent her a message when we got to Manila. Would she like to chat over the phone? Her response: “Sorry, I’m already asleepy.” Mind-boggling.
When I lived in Malabon a couple of years ago, I would fall asleep exactly before the moment my panadero neighbors turned their radio on. April Boys at ear-splitting volume, heralding morning like an electronic cock. How could anybody sleep when Vhingo and Jimmy are presenting tales of lost loves? O bakit ba tayo’y nagkalayo? Crappy music – as proven by the US Armed Forces – can be an instrument of torture. Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You could make dictators and terrorists become as meek as Bambi and Thumper.
I sometimes feel like Californian Randy Gardner who tried to deprive himself of sleep in an experiment in the ’60s and fell into a silent stupor. Was he awake, was he asleep, was he stuck in a hazy middle ground? Or a bit like Christian Bale’s character in The Machinist? That movie brilliantly nicked the mood and menace of the works by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and gave them a Sixth Sense-style makeover. Nothing like invisible danger to deprive a person of sleep and fat (which socialites dread).
Sleep is important. To sleep perchance to dream. Hey, even Superman needs a dosage of dreams, which is the reason he flies to the Fortress of Solitude in that gay (read: happy) attire. Even superheroes need some shut-eye. (I guess Doctor Doom doesn’t get much sleep, that’s why he’s aiming for the next best thing – world domination.) How much more a weakling of a writer who is most alive and kicking at roughly around 3 to 3:30 a.m.?
How come they air all the good shows – Vincent Price/Peter Cushing shockers, offbeat documentaries, Crank Yankers, Hey Arnold – at that hour? During primetime, the movie channels show tearjerkers and Vin Diesel (what a bogus name!) brain-sappers, while free TV channels dish out an endless stream of Korean soap operas where characters get into assorted entanglements, die of assorted diseases, and climb stairways to heaven.
I have a former officemate whose habit was to take a nap when our boss attended meetings. One time, my boss had a marathon meeting (roughly the length of a Cecil B. DeMille epic), so my officemate took a marathon nap. A very long nap. As long as his drool. He woke up and tried to play tug-of-war with his saliva. What an epic battle: like Moses trying to contain the Red Sea. The sea won.
I can’t sleep in a bus. I keep thinking of Metallica’s Cliff Burton. I can’t sleep in a plane. While other people snore like white noise machines in the dark, I stare into the portable TV screen like a paranoid android. How could anybody sleep inside a cramped capsule flying thousands of feet over an abyss? Like a memorial park in mid-air. It doesn’t help also that I get a seat next to a person as big as the Smokey Mountain Brothers and the Bakal Boys combined. With bladder problems.
I read somewhere that to forgo sleep is to make one’s life twice longer. Twice the dread and the drudgery? Only the sheep would be ecstatic.
A version of this story first appeared in The Philippine Star, 2005.
