Sleep

OK I do this meme from Shingo before it is too late.

1) How do you sleep at night?

Is your sleep affected by the national angst? Do you drop off easily, as you always did? Or does it take a while to get to sleep?

It’s very funny – I’m reading a biography of the Beatles now, which traces in great detail all the stuff that happened until 1970. John Lennon, who wrote the song “How Do You Sleep”, comes across a nasty brute. I used to like him a lot more, because I thought he was the idealistic Beatle, but now I think he just has a lot of psychological issues.

There was one time when I failed to get to sleep, and that was the day after I failed a maths test for the first time, and it was my F Maths "A" levels prelim. I didn’t sleep much that night. In the wee hours of the morning, there was this cricket, and it had this long plaintive wail. Nowadays when I hear that cricket (remember that in Pinocchio the cricket was the voice of the conscience) I remember this incident.

This was the exam that my parents told me was the most important one of my life (I think my father failed to get into uni because of his “A” levels, one of the big regrets of his life, even though he did his ACCA instead and it’s like a uni education. That year he gave me a lot of lectures about how important your “A” levels are, which is very unusual since it’s my mother who’s always on my back instead. If not for the ACCA he would not have met my mother and if not for that I would not exist. But I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.)

It was a kick up the backside I needed and for the rest of that prelim and for the “A”s itself it was pretty much straight As. Except for my GP. In order to make up for getting a B for my GP, I set up a blog. Actually not, but that’s a good story.

The only time I found it hard to get to sleep recently was the day before my marathon. Possibly it was all the food, but maybe it was the first time for a long time I had something to get worried about. (I would either finish it, in which case I would never run again, or I would fail, in which case I would have to train for another year.)

I’ve had my own room now for almost 20 years. I’m a night owl. I usually don’t like to sleep early. Usually by the time I get to sleep I’m so tired that I just drop. Otherwise I will read a book and it usually takes 5 minutes.

I don’t keep regular hours on weekends. If you go to a 24 hour place you get the whole place to yourself for you to lounge around a book. 3 am in the morning is the only time when Singapore is not an overcrowded place.

I’m not too worried about the economic crisis as of now, although I am aware that that could change any time.

2) What strategies, if needed, do you use to get to sleep? Pills? Sheep? Late night television shows? And/or...?

How can I put this delicately?

3) Do you wake up in the middle of the night, plagued by obsessive thoughts?

I sleep right under a window. My mattress is right in the middle of the floor. If a storm is coming, or if it suddenly gets cold and I don’t have a blanket, I wake up after a while. I have to do that. I have a thick woolen blanket that I bought in the States (I paid $2 for it, so it was a bargain.) and I can’t sleep in it for long unless the weather is cold. Sometimes there’s a draft, and I catch a cold.

4) What strategies do you have to get back to sleep?

See #2.

5) Are your dreams affected?

Yeh my dreams are usually edgy. Not in the sense of running away from monsters. More like being full of tension an indecision.

The other night, I dreamt that I was in Prague. (I once spent 3 weeks in there at one point). I met up with my sister there and we would be joining up with our parents. We hadn’t yet arranged with them where to meet. We would call them. We walked in and out of the hotel. Maybe I was reading a book. It was late autumn, and the weather was getting cold. We were supposed to wait at the end of a road or something. The landscape was what I imagined a communist country to be like: lots of factories out there doing nothing productive other than polluting the environment. Chilly wind. We were supposed to meet them at 8pm. It came and went. Did we call them? Maybe they didn’t know. We walked around for 1 hour looking for a phone. It was a bit of a dump yard, with a few pieces of abandoned furniture.

One very common feature in my dreams are large buildings, be they hospitals, or universities or apartment complexes. Or familiar rooms where there is a door you never saw before that leads somewhere else. (Think “Lion / Witch / Wardrobe”).

A lot of my dreams are like Kafka’s. If you read “The Trial”, there is a lot of walking around and scratching your head and wondering what the hell is going on. Should anybody be surprised that he is one of my favourite authors?

Prague! Prague was the city that Kafka lived in all his life. That most neurotic and anxious of the 20th century authors......