Gimlé

‘I was all right,’ he said at last. ‘I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn’t any home I’d ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn’t remember it. I mostly don’t. I can’t. I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.’
Ursula K. LeGuin—The Lathe of Heaven

I used to suffer from insomnia.

I’d lie in bed, awake, trying to fall asleep until I either finally gave up and just got up, or until I finally fell asleep for a couple of uneasy, fitful hours.

You can’t get anything done in a state like that. A tired mind is a relatively useless mind. So those waking hours, rather than adding anything useful to your life, actually do nothing but bleed your brain dry.

You can’t write. You can’t edit things already written. And although you’re constantly thinking (partly the cause for the insomnia), the thoughts, observations are blunt. An edge dulled by the constant drone of sleeplessness.

I can’t stop thinking and that keeps me awake some nights.

That, added to the fact that my lungs are crap (I’d be dead by now if I were a smoker) which cause me mild discomfort on a semi-regular basis (caused by anything from pollution, to dust, to pollen, anything small that gets into my lungs) used to keep me awake every night.

Not pain, just something that borders on it. Or maybe it is pain and I simply have gotten used to it.

Insomnia is a black hole. Anything useful, productive and enjoyable gets sucked into it, experiences disappear before you had the chance to enjoy them.

It sucked about three years of my life away. Three years that I hardly remember (or remember less, given my already horrible situational memory). Books, movies and writing kept me alive.

I’d write when I felt the sharpest. Essays for my undergraduate course in literature and fiction.

I’d read when I wasn’t quite sharp enough to write.

And at night. At the times when I simply gave up and needed something to fill the numbing, voracious maw that was my dulled mind, I’d watch movies.

And, strangely enough, I remember them all.

At that point I made a point of only renting classics and world cinema. With almost no new American cinema at all (I tend to define new as anything made or published in the last 25 years thereby exposing myself as a snob).

Movies, books and writing kept me sane.

But I first got properly cured when I moved to the UK. I don’t know whether it is simply that the English winter is more compatible with my psyche than the Icelandic winter, or simply the added independence of living in a different country, but something simply clicked in my mind.

And sleep came much more easily.

Which makes weeks like last week all the stranger. For five nights I only got about fifteen hours sleep in total, leaving me fairly incapable of being productive during daytime.

And last night I slept like a rock from around eleven in the evening til two o’clock in the afternoon. Fifteen hours straight.

It feels wonderful.

It’s the feeling that, this is what normalcy feels like. This is what feeling alright is like.

It’s being overwhelmed with an appreciation for the not-too-happy, not-too-sad feeling.

Ecstacy is overrated and depression, however romantic, sucks.

Sitting in the sun. Hearing Miles Davis echo from somebody’s car or apartment. Worrying a bit about bills and rent. But generally feeling alright.

That’s what it’s all about.

It’s good, in balance and harmony with the bad.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.