AT LUNCH THE OTHER DAY, someone asked me what I thought about The Charlie Rose Show. I answered that I didn’t think anything about it, because by the time it comes on in Chicago I’m usually waking up for the first time. I appear to be entering the stage in life where sleep is topic number one for me and my contemporaries. “Getting much,” the rude phrase from my youth, has come to take on a whole new meaning–“much” nowadays referring to sleep, sound, solid, restful sleep.
“How did you sleep?” I recall once asking a friend when we were fellow houseguests. “Splendidly,” he said. “I didn’t make a single error.” I must be making lots of them, for I seem to sleep well perhaps one night out of seven; and splendid means getting up only once or twice without any goofy dreams disturbing my sleep.
Lots of articles on sleep deprivation, insomnia, and other bedtime maladies are popping up in the press, which suggests that sleep problems may be fairly widespread. The New York Times‘s health writer, Calamity (as she’s known) Jane Brody has recently written two such articles. Television stories about the troublesome side effects of sleeping pills–Ambien and others–are getting lots of play, though no one has yet written the advertising line about sleeping pills to match the gem turned out by the genius copywriter for Cialis, the sex stimulant pill. Perhaps it might be: If sleep persists for more than eight hours, be sure to see a physician.
I try to be in bed by 10:30 p.m. and up not later than 5:30 a.m. (Einstein said that the people who get things done in the world all get up around five in the morning.) That makes me, on good nights, a seven-hour-a-night man. Yet fewer and fewer are the nights when I get those seven hours uninterrupted. Part of this is physiological, having to do with aging bladders, a subject upon which I prefer not to dwell. But part of it is mental.
I don’t usually have a tough time getting to sleep. I’ve found that cello music, played adagio, provides an excellent inducement to sleep. A few years ago I acquired an excellent CD called Lullaby, Sweet Dreams for Children of All Ages, in which the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, accompanied by various pianists, plays Brahms and other lullabies with such sweet soporific titles as “Gentle Dreams,” “Shepherd’s Lullaby,” and “Slumber Song.”
Even better than the cello for sleep is listening to a radio broadcast, at low volume, of Chicago Cubs games played on the West Coast. No one, in bed in a dark room, could hope to make it beyond half an inning listening to the assemblage of platitudes and commonplaces of the Cubs’ two serenely dull radio announcers. Fortunately, I was clever enough to put in my nuptial agreement that I be permitted to listen to West Coast games in bed for the rest of my life.
I read before falling asleep. I’m selective here: Nothing dark or tricky is permitted bedside; my current fare is Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. The dopey cliché about “curling up in bed with a good book” has never applied to me. I can’t read in bed for more than half an hour. Nor, when I wake in the middle of the night, do I ever return to my book.
No, once awakened, I try my best to lull myself back to sleep. Often I revert to scenes of my boyhood to do the job. I imagine myself playing tennis at Indian Boundary Park with my friend Bob Swenson, and all my serves go in. I picture a charming Yorkshire terrier named Max romping along the beach. I attempt to disengage my mind, let it wander where it will, and call it back only when it threatens to go into the troublesome territory of night fears or anxiety.
A chief worry one encounters on sleepless nights is that one’s lack of sleep will ruin the next day. Suddenly one can’t sleep because one is nervous about not sleeping. A good way to combat this, though I’m not always able to achieve it, is to attempt actually to enjoy one’s insomniacal nights. On occasion, at 2:37 or 3:18 a.m. (thank you, digital clock), I can calmly sort out quotidian complications, seek solutions for problems in things I’m writing, or instead just lie there counting not sheep but my blessings.
My night life, it occurs to me, may now be more interesting than the life I live during the day. Certainly it is more unpredictable. As I turn off my bed lamp, I never know how long I shall be able to sleep without interruption. My dreams, meanwhile, get wilder and wilder. Last night I was playing a deep leftfield in a night softball game on an unlit field. The night before the dead wife of a much older and now also dead friend turned up and flirted with me. Last week I lost my then-aged father at Heathrow.
Give me, I don’t say, a break, but just a little more sleep would be nice.
– Joseph Epstein
