Body clock

Late nights, dreams as defrag, déjà vu, early writing

I’m an early bird whose friends are mostly night owls, and while I can stay up late if I need to, I’m grateful for how accommodating my more awake friends can be. For example, when I stay with my friend Jess it’s a given that I’ll go and sleep in her bed a full three hours before she joins me, with maybe a brief waking up to get a drink of water as she’s winding down, sleepy passing ships in the kitchen. And this tenderness in our routine makes me happy, like we’re an old married couple rather than two close friends.

Because I’m a bad sleeper as well as an early waker, I now have a tracker that gives me a neat little report each morning – a ring beloved of tech bros, which monitors a bewildering array of my functions and which has earned me the unsexy nickname Bilbo. Turns out there’s such a thing as too much information. Temperatures, fluctuations of stress and repose, sleep apportioned into different kinds. The tracker tells me I don’t get enough REM sleep, which is funny, because I feel every night is full of dreaming. Perhaps I’m only skating on the surface of it. If I had enough of the right kind of sleep, I still might dream but not remember what happens, keep them buried in whatever psychological vault they belong in.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to actually talk about my dreams in detail. I’m interested more in whatever biological impulse causes them than in their events, what sparks the brain electrics that cause me such grief and fascination. I described my dreams to a friend as brain defrag, because they are often upsetting, but also feel like in their upsettingness they are sorting neatly, even benevolently, through things that require sorting. On a night where I sleep well and deeply, the resultant feeling of order is startling.

Alongside the dreams, lately, the strangest déjà vu. It can last for hours, vaguely, two worlds colliding – or rather a world layered on top of another world. Walking in warm sunlight I feel transported, very specifically, to springtime several years ago, except it’s the start of autumn now, and everything is different. It’s a feeling more discomfiting than simple nostalgia, than remembrance. A prickly, whole-body feeling of temporal wooziness.

What it means is that sometimes the daytimes feel like a dream and in the night I feel awake, and not just awake but busy, running from one place to another. Sometimes the dreams spill over into tentative lucidity. I read about a practice called “Critical state testing”, where you ask yourself, throughout the day, if what you are experiencing is a dream. You examine your fingers, your palms, the world around you, and in the end you’ll find yourself doing this in your dreams, too, and then you can say, with triumph – yes, this is a dream. And then you can do what you want, theoretically, run rampant through your brain’s landscape.

When I read this I remembered that I used to do this, or something similar, as a child. Sometimes I’d stare at my hand until it felt unfamiliar and unattached to me, and I would get the feeling that my body was rising up like a balloon, that actually nothing was real, that everything was a dream but one there was no waking from. I felt a sharpness that I couldn’t articulate, and a panic, too, like by doing this I was peeking behind a door that must remain closed. I was too young to understand concepts like dissociation. But despite the panic there was a certain, forbidden pleasure in spooking myself, and in asking myself: what is real? Am I real? What of none of this is real? What then? I can still remember how it felt to stare at the pink lines of my palm and realise that I was a human animal, that I possessed consciousness and existed in the world, and that around me mysterious and unknowable galaxies whirled around.

In Corfu, recently, my phone kept switching between Albanian and Greek timezones, an hour that was lost, then gained, then lost again, but there was little to pin the routine of the days in place, so it didn’t matter. We ate when hungry and swam all day, and there was no need for a jacket, even in the dark, even as night bled into another day. One morning we got up and swam at dawn. It was beautiful, until the point where I dimly remembered that sharks are more active in the early morning and twilight, and that was it for me, the possibility introduced – I had to scramble over the barnacles and leave the molten pink of the water.

Perhaps like a shark I am more crepuscular than simple early bird, with two spots of energy in my day. Early mornings and evening are my favourite times to write, compressed portions of day when the light is changing, when the mood is changing, from asleep to awake, and then back. I’m always reluctant to recommend early morning writing in itself to others, though, because it’s just not always possible. What if you’re exhausted, or caring, or work strange hours? What if you’re just not an early bird, or a shark? It’s not about puritanism or work ethic, but pure preference. Write in the night, if you’re an owl. Write whenever you want or can.

I associate morning writing with writing The Water Cure before work, how it became my favourite time of day. Now I love it too because of the quiet, because of the way the light at the moment is translucent blue and I get to see the sun come up, because at that time of day the critical voice in my head is quietened. It always feels so still, no matter what has come the day before or will come that day. The sky, newly unrolled, seems to forgive and invite anything.