Song of the Sleepless: 5 am

5 am
Five ay em

I’ve been up since 2:50, but I’ve only now roused myself from bed. I struggled assiduously to fall back asleep, but I was unable. My body lay supinated for hours, but my mind somnolently stumbled on…directionless. I forged new ground for sleepless philosophers everywhere by coining the term “dualistic somnambulism.” The body is ataxic, but the mind is sleepwalking. At 2:50 in the morning, the mind/body nexus breaks. It’s a fact. Spinoza would hate me, but he’s dead, and I’ve been awake for hours. I don’t need to respect his crazy, dead, sleeping philosophy.

I couldn’t control what I remembered, nor where my thoughts were headed. I re-encountered my first kiss; the first time I held a baby; the first time a friend died. But what I lacked in control, I made up for in power: I didn’t have any boundaries to what I could or could not do. I imagined excitedly (if that is the right word) that I was flying slowly or floating quickly. Excited, of course, being a relative term; I was excited like a tree, or excited like a pole. I was as excited as the lowest form of life can be excited. Excited like a hibernating protozoa. Somehow, I was excited and capable. I could have run a marathon, if I had the choice or desire. I just moved. It was zen, in a way. I didn’t think, but I was thinking. I didn’t move, but I was moving. I wasn’t sitting curled up like a pretzel, but–by God–if I would have thought it, I would have been able to do it. But try as I might to uncover the source of my insomnia, it remained concealed.

So I lay there. Still and silent. Time went by quickly, but it seemed agonizingly slow. I looked at my watch at 3:00 and felt years melt away, but I still did not sleep. I breathed. I beat my heart. I moved food and water through my viscera. I just didn’t sleep. I massaged the cabinets in my lungs, trying to restore them from the damage of smoking last night. Last night.
I played imaginary chess with Gary Kasporov, which I didn’t enjoy–I’d rather be sleeping. He won, but he didn’t mock me, and he instructed me how to play better in the future. I will never remember these imaginary chess tips from the master. I checked my watch: 4:15. It seemed like a long time, but could it really have been one-and-a-quarter hours? Mercury is NOT in retrograde any longer, so it must be true. Maybe Gary reset my watch when he was castling me.

I found a way to gently steer my hulking cognitive vessel. Not by much, like doing the J-stroke with a spoon on a rudderless battleship, but it turned where I wanted it to, if only to the femto degree. Go ahead and laugh, but its my femto degree of control, and I need it, because it’s all I have. Frankly, I am satisfied simply with knowing that I am awake. I am alive and I am awake. I could sleuth later, but I had to get up.

I rolled out of bed, maneuvered deftly around my brother sleeping on the floor, snatched my computer and snuck upstairs without waking the dogs. Clearly my ninja skills are not as undeveloped as my sleeping skills.

My world is characterized by differences right now; it is a series of opposing worlds layered, one upon the other.
Take, for example, the sunrise. In the real world, it is still dark; this is the lack of sunrise. Daylight savings time pokes Helios in the ribs earlier now, but not as early as five–even he gets to sleep longer than I do. Staring from my kitchen windows into the liquid black, I can see without seeing anything. Instead of objects, shapes, and colours, I see depth, thickness, and texture. When I blink, the soft darkness becomes grainy with starbursts–from dark pool to black quicksand made from ash and aquifer. The kind of quicksand that you only see once. Suffocating dark.

The real sunrise is happening on computer’s wallpaper image. Riding strongly above a plain speckled with a few stands of trees is a magnificent cloud. Portentious and inimical. Vesuvius erupted again, but instead of bringing night, it brought a terrifying sunrise. It makes me think of Vesuvius. Who was the graffiti artist whose last (maybe only) recorded words were “all voices fell silent”? Will I have any famous last words? None so captivating. None so outstanding. Perhaps we will have forgotten Pompeii when I am old, and I can steal that person’s legacy and graft it into my own. Of course, the circumstances surrounding my death would have to be appropriate. I couldn’t die alone. Those words are forever bound to the apocalypse. I pray that I don’t have to utter them seriously.

Out of the deep dark, something moves. A long, sleek form in the long sleek ocean of smooth, emollient black. A narwhal soars in front of or behind me. I can’t really tell which, but I see either its shape or its shadow in my eyes. Its fuselage is the colour of midnight, with keel of maddening gray. As it passes by, it leaves behind it a trail of dark phosphorescence–flecks of gneiss and quartz that prismatically reflect all the gloomy spectra of black and night. It’s horn is a great basalt column cutting sharp lines in the inky, pyroxene silence.

All black. All at 5 am.