A. Insomnia
And there you are again, positioning your body cautiously in the boundless vastness that is your bed, wondering why your restless mind keeps you awake as if your body needs no sleep. It’s not that you have just read, before crawling in bed, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (should have felt lucky if you didn’t want to kill yourself after that) or that you have just proofread your email of record-breaking length to your cheating girlfriend a hundredth time. I’m sure insomnia also comes up at you every once in a while. I’ve always faced it upfront, and have some bad and good strategies to share with you.
You should absolutely avoid focusing on your heart beating. Some may think the monotonous pattern of heartbeat can induce boredom and eventually, loss of concentration and entry into unconsciousness. But this is false impression. In my experience, you will actually startle yourself, realizing like you never did before that your heart does beat in this way at this speed. You feel and even hear the synchronized pulsation, which lies not only in your chest, but also near your throat, at the right side of your forehead, in your abdomen (and sometimes even in your eyelid or in your thigh)… The room is dark and silent and there are streaks of light coming from outside the window, only very weakly but strong enough to penetrate your eyelids. You become hyperconscious of yourself, hearing your heart beat faster and ever more deliberately… (And don’t even think about focusing your attention on breathing. Trust me, waiting for nothing in the dark with bated breath is way worse than feeling your heart beat like crazy.)
You should totally think of things that aren’t related to your immediate surroundings (which includes your own body, a capital mistake the former two examples just illustrated). Your mind is restless, so you need to feed it something to contemplate. Here’s what I recommend. Wrap your mind around one thing—for example, how you met you friend Anthony today:
It was pretty cold. In fact you were freezing and your back was hunched like a mad man. Anthony, however, was wearing that purple peasant blouse of his, inside his half-open jacket. He nodded at you, and somehow triggered the memory that he owes you a dime bag of weed. But you were busy getting to your next class on the other side of the campus, so you decided to let it pass this time. You walked past Anthony, and library, and then the Fine Art Center… Professor Conner was late today… people were waiting in the lecture hall. One TA left and searched for Professor Conner… The other two stayed… Vincent didn’t show up in class today… You looked around the room… didn’t see his dark brown hair… you didn’t finish the reading last night… but the lecture was quite all right… just felt a bit sleepy and couldn’t concentrate… Professor Conner came back… he apologized… Yeah the lecture was all right…
It will be the next morning when you wake up and ask yourself when exactly you finally fell asleep. You have no idea what was the last thought you had at that tipping point when you finally knocked yourself unconscious. But whatever, the plot doesn’t matter. What matters is that as you focus your mind on the narratives, you enter a world different from the actual world where you are desperate and wanting to fall asleep. As you lose yourself in this other world, you lose your consciousness.
B. Sleep
But sleep has become the ultimate escape for you, Natalie. Insomnia is for mind miners and self-analysts who still consider their chances considerable, in fighting it out, during the day (but to fight what out, really?). You no longer agonize over the impression you made on the guy in the metro today. He who gave you a neurotic smile and looked at his own shoes later, he who was in fact making a phone call with another, another who wouldn't mind his neurosis. Granted, you started seeking some impression to be made at first, but the pressure of the air soon pushed you back. It's not worth it, Natalie. You have yourself to spit your contempt for yourself to.
In any case, you still care, but you no longer seek solutions. You put it off till after sleep except every morning (or afternoon) when you wake up, it is another new day, like they say. Sleep is the only place where you are safe and where you no longer have to confront that guy in the metro. If you fight or quarrel, it is simply because you seem to need that paroxysm of passion at the time; if you avoid to fight or quarrel, it only means that tranquility cries louder than any other. You are tired but it is not with a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment that you shut your eyes and lock yourself up to your sleep.
The next day you no longer remember the end of a conversation, how badly or how well it concluded itself the day before. You go back to the chat log to check, if you're lucky, or memory will surface itself just in time, to remind you what the conclusion was. You make a mental note of it and you let it pass — it was yesterday. And today is a new day, as they say.
But that is just a form of denial, Natalie, if you're willing to so admit. Every new start premises upon the extermination of everything that happens before it, physical or mental. When you try to patch up all the fragments, it hurts you more than ever that some of the pieces are too damaged to be put back in their old places. But you let it go, knowing that you can never actually let it go.
False optimism refreshes the human memory, while souvenirs from the buried past remain. We are more deeply entrapped in our past than we are ever prepared to accept. History also puts down its own wounds sometimes, but when they are revisited, they bring up such sentiments of impotence that you kneel down before the ruins and you cannot stop weeping. Perhaps the revelation of the scars itself already suffices, if no solution can ever be found, when, after the loss of innocence, you encounter the truth.
C. On Dec. 6
"There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-woman; and so one had to become oblivious in the dream of life."
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
And there you are again, positioning your body cautiously in the boundless vastness that is your bed, wondering why your restless mind keeps you awake as if your body needs no sleep. It’s not that you have just read, before crawling in bed, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (should have felt lucky if you didn’t want to kill yourself after that) or that you have just proofread your email of record-breaking length to your cheating girlfriend a hundredth time. I’m sure insomnia also comes up at you every once in a while. I’ve always faced it upfront, and have some bad and good strategies to share with you.
You should absolutely avoid focusing on your heart beating. Some may think the monotonous pattern of heartbeat can induce boredom and eventually, loss of concentration and entry into unconsciousness. But this is false impression. In my experience, you will actually startle yourself, realizing like you never did before that your heart does beat in this way at this speed. You feel and even hear the synchronized pulsation, which lies not only in your chest, but also near your throat, at the right side of your forehead, in your abdomen (and sometimes even in your eyelid or in your thigh)… The room is dark and silent and there are streaks of light coming from outside the window, only very weakly but strong enough to penetrate your eyelids. You become hyperconscious of yourself, hearing your heart beat faster and ever more deliberately… (And don’t even think about focusing your attention on breathing. Trust me, waiting for nothing in the dark with bated breath is way worse than feeling your heart beat like crazy.)
You should totally think of things that aren’t related to your immediate surroundings (which includes your own body, a capital mistake the former two examples just illustrated). Your mind is restless, so you need to feed it something to contemplate. Here’s what I recommend. Wrap your mind around one thing—for example, how you met you friend Anthony today:
It was pretty cold. In fact you were freezing and your back was hunched like a mad man. Anthony, however, was wearing that purple peasant blouse of his, inside his half-open jacket. He nodded at you, and somehow triggered the memory that he owes you a dime bag of weed. But you were busy getting to your next class on the other side of the campus, so you decided to let it pass this time. You walked past Anthony, and library, and then the Fine Art Center… Professor Conner was late today… people were waiting in the lecture hall. One TA left and searched for Professor Conner… The other two stayed… Vincent didn’t show up in class today… You looked around the room… didn’t see his dark brown hair… you didn’t finish the reading last night… but the lecture was quite all right… just felt a bit sleepy and couldn’t concentrate… Professor Conner came back… he apologized… Yeah the lecture was all right…
It will be the next morning when you wake up and ask yourself when exactly you finally fell asleep. You have no idea what was the last thought you had at that tipping point when you finally knocked yourself unconscious. But whatever, the plot doesn’t matter. What matters is that as you focus your mind on the narratives, you enter a world different from the actual world where you are desperate and wanting to fall asleep. As you lose yourself in this other world, you lose your consciousness.
B. Sleep
But sleep has become the ultimate escape for you, Natalie. Insomnia is for mind miners and self-analysts who still consider their chances considerable, in fighting it out, during the day (but to fight what out, really?). You no longer agonize over the impression you made on the guy in the metro today. He who gave you a neurotic smile and looked at his own shoes later, he who was in fact making a phone call with another, another who wouldn't mind his neurosis. Granted, you started seeking some impression to be made at first, but the pressure of the air soon pushed you back. It's not worth it, Natalie. You have yourself to spit your contempt for yourself to.
In any case, you still care, but you no longer seek solutions. You put it off till after sleep except every morning (or afternoon) when you wake up, it is another new day, like they say. Sleep is the only place where you are safe and where you no longer have to confront that guy in the metro. If you fight or quarrel, it is simply because you seem to need that paroxysm of passion at the time; if you avoid to fight or quarrel, it only means that tranquility cries louder than any other. You are tired but it is not with a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment that you shut your eyes and lock yourself up to your sleep.
The next day you no longer remember the end of a conversation, how badly or how well it concluded itself the day before. You go back to the chat log to check, if you're lucky, or memory will surface itself just in time, to remind you what the conclusion was. You make a mental note of it and you let it pass — it was yesterday. And today is a new day, as they say.
But that is just a form of denial, Natalie, if you're willing to so admit. Every new start premises upon the extermination of everything that happens before it, physical or mental. When you try to patch up all the fragments, it hurts you more than ever that some of the pieces are too damaged to be put back in their old places. But you let it go, knowing that you can never actually let it go.
False optimism refreshes the human memory, while souvenirs from the buried past remain. We are more deeply entrapped in our past than we are ever prepared to accept. History also puts down its own wounds sometimes, but when they are revisited, they bring up such sentiments of impotence that you kneel down before the ruins and you cannot stop weeping. Perhaps the revelation of the scars itself already suffices, if no solution can ever be found, when, after the loss of innocence, you encounter the truth.
C. On Dec. 6
"There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-woman; and so one had to become oblivious in the dream of life."
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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