helenic | circadian

My head is clamouring: too many undreamt thoughts, too many late nights extending to sunrise. Ideas take on new meaning at these hours. Brain becoming sharp with exhaustion, focussing on pinpoints, and words begin to seem luminous with clarity and imagined insight; bed noting the imprint of me, the dimpled warm soaked in books and sleep; water and suddenly the purity of it is astonishing, the light sluicing though it incandescent. There's birdsong outside and a half-written essay eating at the back of my mind, but I'm too full of abstracts and nonsense to work, unable to control the incessant stream of consciousness. Is it possible to dream awake, I wonder? to sort and process subliminal imagery with the body still active, churning out half-visions from a corner of the mind?

My hands are shaking and my reflection looks strangely young, pink-mouthed and wideeyed. This is the third night in a fortnight now, insomnia keeping me on the brink between sleep and work and frustratingly unable to do either. I'm full of words; in my head they're full of meaning, but as soon as I try to form them they become ridiculous. (Like that dream where I write the perfect novel, re-reading it with wonder and joy and forcing myself to remember every detail until I wake in a frenzy of excitement, scribble it all down, and finally stare at the page as I realise the plot is random, mundane, meaningless. The mood of it lingers though, something intangibly sweet and pure at the back of memory, waiting to be fleshed out and fulfilled.)

Lying there unsleeping, I keep taunting myself with imagined suffering: violence and - worse - loss. It's been a night-time habit as long as I can remember, the tentative visualisations of death and more importantly the reactions to it, exposing myself to my own potential grief like pressing a bruise to see if it hurts. I don't know if it's to emotionally defend myself against the possibility or something more self-indulgent, but I've reduced myself to tears with the imaginary death of a loved one, how it must feel: the immediate tightness, the hardness, the unbearable internal ache. It's never happened and I don't know why I torment myself with the thought of it. It's only at this hour, this strange breed of madness at four am, the lowest point of the diurnal cycle when you're physically weakened and everything seems to hum. At this time of night I loathe myself.

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I think I have some idea of what you mean here.

The three things in my life I'm continually required to do to stay sane are work, sleep and create (it doesn't really matter what). I frequently favour one at the neglect of the others, but the worst is being unable to to any of them.

I suppose the trick is not to let it overwhelm you. At 5am it was quite messy in my head, but by 6am the sun had risen and I went outside and it was pale and quiet and fragrant with blossom, and the chaos of the night seemed utterly insignificant. I can definitely recommend early morning walks - not as a cure for insomnia, but as a counter to it. And take a camera.

x

Everyone I've spoken to on this subject agrees: half-three to five am is the worst time, when your body starts complaining about the unfair treatment and the light has yet to bring the faculty of wonder back.

I used to walk when I was like this, but it got silly; Cambridge is so flat that you can walk forever without being tired, and you end up discovering all the identikit suburbs with wide drives and grimy corners; and orange street lights make everything harsh and ugly. I'd rather save my energy for when the streets are still empty and the first delicate light shows up; if I am humanly capable of walking then, I do.

These days, of course, the drugs preclude the possibility of insomnia, though they have their own chaos.

Photography is yet another one of those fields I've always been vaguely interested in but have never dedicated much time to. I generally hate bad-quality snaps; they don't do justice to glorious moments, and I am deeply fond of the art of acknowledging a moment's significance and then letting it go; until I develop total recall, of course.

I suppose I was really referring to dawn-walking. 4am I get through either by reading, writing or drawing, although the latter is rarely cathartic due to a marked lack of skill. I admit I've never walked out of Cambridge centre - I've walked the fens and outlying villages huge numbers of times (I have a particular fondness for Crowland abbey) but I used to live in Histon, and I know exactly what you mean by "identikit suburbs". Our house was fortunately opposite an abandoned railway, which provided my five-year-old self with all the entertainment I needed.

As far as photography goes, I admit my ignorance in the field, but to me glorious moments are most usually due to light, and while photography may not do them justice a lot of the time it can still capture something far better than I could with words.

A few years back i used to suffer from insomnia, and would be reduced to tears of frustration night after night because all i wanted to do was go to sleep. Now, sleep has become an annoying necessity- i don't really want to sleep, and consequently my sleeping pattern has fallen apart completely. It's completely draining, and all you want is to sleep eight hours uninterrupted.

It's the worst, when you want to sleep and can't. Especially when you have a hideous working day ahead of you, which I knew I did (although I did get the essay finished in the end, thank god). I've tried milky drinks and workouts (they often just give me more energy) and my last resort is usually to a book, but the last few times I've tried that I ended up reading until 6am and had a headache for the next 24 hours.

I've come to the conclusion it's not so much about caffeine (I drink so much tea it probably has no effect on me any more) as diet. Too many carbohydrates and sugars and not enough fresh fruit and veg. The problem is whenever I buy fruit I eat it all in a day, and I can't afford to do that more than once a week. Self discipline is the way to go, I think.

xxx
(apologies for rambling)

Rambling is perfectly fine. Actually the idea that eating too much carbohydrates stops you sleeping properly is interesting- i've just become vegetarian and am eating more carbohydrate to make up for the lack of meat, so perhaps that's affecting my sleeping pattern. I'm sorry i can't really suggest anything to help- its normally just down to too much stress, which is stupid since the thing you need mose when you are overworked is sleep.

I think something's going to happen. Inactivity and frustration have never sat well on your shoulders my friend. At some point, stuck between sleep and work, you'll suddenly go sideways and all sorts of things will happen. When it happened to me I found it was 4am, and I was wide awake and creative, just like that. I read the script version of Guards! Guards! in about half an hour, and then coded a completely new program for a little project I was doing. Looking at it the next day I have no idea what the hell I was on when I wrote it, and I certainly wouldn't have written it that way normally, but it works like a dream. Now I'm a pretty boring guy at the best of times, and I speed-read a book and wrote a completely enigmatic piece of code. I expect something far more interesting from you. ;-)

The hard part is getting to the cracking point, soon, and without becoming a complete insomniac.

The rest of that week I got up at about 5pm and went to bed about 10am. (What? Lectures are between 10am and 5pm? Oh well.) The effect of seeing the dawn for 5 days running had an effect on me I am still only coming to understand. Call it calmness, serenity, me walking round with an unnerving, knowing smile for about a month, whatever. If you're going to do a little staying up late, go the whole hog and see the dawn.

It's worth it.

unfortunately the creative products of nights like that are like the dream novel: no matter how inspired they seem, they come out flat and pretentious (like that post, in fact). Webdesign is a frequent night time refuge but the same thing happens - the things I write, when I read through them, weren't what I wanted to say at all, and weren't anywhere near as good.

Perhaps painting is the way to go ...

Unfortunately I'm unable to become completely nocturnal because while I rarely attend lectures, I have supervisions most afternoons and some mornings. Besides which having a ground-floor room facing onto the quad is a little too noisy to sleep in during the day.

What happened on Sunday was, having reached 6.30am, I decided that I may as well have my usual sunday morning lie-in with Iain anyway, and went to his room. I got to see the sunrise, but it wasn't so much a rise as a gradual going from more grey to less grey. The scent of the blossom was nice though.

i don't know if it's the delirium of sleeplessness, it always does this to me, but that was so vivid i was utterly taken aback. this is how 4am feels. such a brilliant piece of writing.x

that means a hell of a lot. thankyou.

xxxxx

I almost don't believe what I'm reading. This is self-indulgently odd, but at about 4 am on the 9th I was thinking the exact same thought and forcing myself into shaking tears as I lay there, unable to sleep, and feeling unbearable. How very bizarre. xxx

perhaps we're closer than we think? of course it could be coincidence but I'm impressionable when it comes to the supernatural. Hope you're sleeping better now, anyway. xxx

circadian

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