12 :

I dreamt I was wrestling snakes.

I dreamt I was making love.

I dreamt I was happy.

Dreams are just dreams. Dreams are bullshit. I dreamt I was wrestling snakes, or running from tidal waves. Or happy. Dreams are bullshit.

The 7.12 train, into the morning sun. Into a dawn that looked like fire. A mouth dry like a desert. A shirt with buttons undone in a sleepwalked rush.

I hate going out and not having brushed my teeth. I hate this. The dull throbbing of leg muscles as I walk to the station. I became all the things I swore I’d never be. A commuter. A worker. A slave. What I wanted to be when I grew up – astronaut, train driver, fighter pilot. I was none of these things.

I was a soft machine : I woke like clockwork, every day at the same time. No matter how much or how little sleep I needed, no matter how much or how little I got, no matter when I went to slept, I always woke at the same hour. And often I could not squeeze an extra second of sleep when I needed it. My body defied me. Consciousness was my punishment.

This was my routine : years of commuting had made a creature of habit and insomnia. I slept like a child : in fitful, stolen moments. Fractured in seconds. Just getting some sleep - any - was a luxury in itself.

A sleepless world was possible, feasible. Like an addict, I functioned, addicted to consciousness, desperate to live every last second. And I could operate heavy machinery such as my legs. But focusing on an object was difficult. The world always looked as if I hadn’t put my glasses on.

Medically, mild insomnia is only two or three weeks of sleep deprivation. Two or three weeks of spending an eternity with your face buried in a pillow. Two or three weeks of staring at headlights over ceilings, two or three weeks of listening to the silence of the streets, counting the minutes between cars passing, projecting your place in the bed in a straight line above you and trying to work out exactly how many years at light speed it would take before you hit another planet.

This is called Transient Insomnia. It is a temporary war, a brief interlude against unconsciousness.

Even if one night feels like forever. One night is bearable. One night without sleep is hard, but not insurmountable. Like a dust mite climbing the leg of a sleeping woman. You can survive it. You do it because you have to - at the basic level, all humans are animals, fighting for survival. Insomnia is just another predator. You fight it.

After a few weeks of sleeplessness, even Transient Insomnia, one night of fractured, absent sleep seems like some improbable, distant dream. After the first few years it gets easier. Constant exhaustion becomes almost normal, in fact. You forget what its like not to feel exhausted.

Even my insomnia was normal, dreary, and off-the-shelf. My neurosis were unexceptional. Without my neurosis, what had I to define myself by? Nothing.

One night of lost sleep was nothing. By the time I graduated to three or four days of lost sleep I was a champion daysleeper. I was neither asleep or awake - the whole world became the same, dull grey monotone without highs or lows, a bland, featureless landscape of stasis. Days and nights ceased to exist. I survived on junk food. I was terrified at the smallest affront to me. I was regressing to the womb where there was neither day or night, light or darkness, just a featureless mass of barely distinguishable events, pleasure, pain, indifference, all rolled into one. I was turning numb : consciousness was my anasthetic.

By the time you get to night twenty one, night twenty two, you’re starting to experiment with it. Fuck with it. You’re starting to bite back.

When I was younger I wondered why we didn’t have switches to move our eyes like Action Man. I spent evening, weeks, looking for a switch at the back of my neck that said ON / OFF. Logic is curved in the small hours. The world suddenly fills with short cuts and back routes. Things that previously seemed unconnected connect. The whole world is a dream you cannot wake from, because you are already awake. Edges blur. And sleep becomes the drug. Gimme gimme gimme. I need some more.

I needed sleep. I was an addict, and this was my cold turkey. All I needed was a hit of sleep. I need it in the way some people need oxygen or smack. I need my oblivion.

In exhaustion everything becomes exaggerated. It’s no longer sunshine. It’s a violent assault on the eyelids when all we crave is the peace of permanent darkness. The Icelandic 24 hour darkness seems like a pipedream from heaven. The Alaskan 24 hour daylight some kind of Danten punishment.

Gimme darkness and silence. I need my fix.

Even the smallest creaking of the floorboards becomes an unsufferable, unbearable jarring rape of the senses. Things become blurred, fuzzy. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Words become indistinct, vague approximation of meanings. Even simple concepts became elastic, slippery, a word like “Yes” as vague as a “Maybe.” What have I done to deserve this?

Fuckdammit. Switch the world off.

I started off the wrong way. There was so much left to be done in the world. So much left to feel. I was extending bedtimes by an hour, getting up an hour earlier. Pushing it an extra hour or two, slowly extending my days from a 66-34% ratio of consciousness to sleep to a 80-20% ratio of consciousness to sleep. I was aiming for 100%. Like Vodka, it was a physical possibility. But probably fatal. And I wanted to defy God. Defy sleep. Control my own destiny.

Youth is so wasted on the young. I was a self-righteous prick and I wasn’t even smart enough to know it. My employers should’ve got me at the time when I knew everything and was paid nothing.

Insomnia was an advantage at University when I needed to submit essays and was running out of time. I needed to keep going once I’d reached my optimum writing speed. The speed of writing is such that you need to build momentum up and maintain that, but once you are at that speed, you can keep at it for a seemingly infinite space, subject only to the muse and your bodily demands. A twelve hour period could easily see 12,000 or even 24,000 words thrown down onto paper. Some of them weren’t very good, but with everything within arms reach (drugs, coffee, chocolate and CD’s) you spend a whole day in the same place without even moving your legs. A time lapse photo would see a static body with a blur where the hands used to be. A relic of old Victorian photography, a single frame exposed over an prolonged period of time.

So I played an experiment to see if the mind ruled the body or the body ruled the mind. I stayed up for days. Day and days. I felt like I’d volunteered myself for some weird scientific experiment without actually any benefits.

Time became an abstract concept. The outside world shrank to a tiny point of light that seeped under a door crack. I was awake in the middle of the night, the middle of the day, and I was the only person alive on a planet of dead people. Sometimes I actually wanted a break, both physically and mentally from a state of enforced consciousness.

I forgot how much of a relief it is to have a holiday from reality - sleep, obliteration of consciousness is a state of temporary coma. I couldn’t achieve that feeling by consciousness, no matter where I went, consciousness came with me, a black dog nipping at my ankles. I didn’t feel like I was made out of flesh. In my state of heightened sensory perception, I felt like I was made out of rock and balsa wood. Strong and fragile. Impervious, brittle.

I wanted to emerge from my waking death. I felt like the only man left alive.

It's a lonely feeling: when you're awake in the middle of the night, it feels like you're the only person in the world not peacefully asleep and dreaming. All around you the sweet sleep and silence of the unconscious masses taunted me. They didn’t know how lucky they were.

There are 60 million insomniacs in America alone. 60,000,000 broken fractured nights of sleep. 400,000,000 lost hours every night.

Every night, the rest of the world became The Night of The Living Dead. Where other people moved in full hyper-speed with a fully compos-mentis set of reactions, motor reflexes, and digestive tracts swollen with fuel, I moved in a sleek military world. My mission : consciousness, an advanced state thereof. I tried to turn my addiction, my illness into a virtue. A quest, a holy quest, a pilgrimmage, a jihad against the sleep of the masses.

By remaining fully conscious I could experience everything - read every book, hear every record, see every sight. In my state of advanced insomnia I became hyper sensitive. My fingertips glowed and sparkled with the vibration of individual air molecules moving over them. There was too much going on out there for me to miss any of it.

If I concentrated I could feel dust mites crawl across my skin. I could feel bacteria growing within me. I would mentally trace where my cancers would be and where the bacteria would reside. I would count the number of bacterial strains in my mouth and try to remember their names. I last remember getting up to two hundred and thirty seven. And each with a name.

To outsiders I was moving sluggishly, a zombie with mogadon reflexes, and probably a desire to eat only live human brains for nourishment. To me, they were babbling rushing fools too busy doing something as to miss the actual experience.

I became jealous of the sun. Even that seemed to get some sleep, though it too suffered insomnia - the orbit gave it a fluctuating sleep pattern, and in places like Iceland the sun did mammoth six month binges of light and then dark. I wanted that kind of stamina. How many does the sun bench?

Imagine half a year without sleep. I felt like I was doing it already. Every night I tried to sleep. Honestly I did. I slowed my breathing, released endorphins, ceased eating so as not to be awake by digestion. I fasted. I renounced alcohol. The breaking down of the component chemicals steals the necessary deep sleep when you drink too much. I lived as a monk. I reduced myself to bare components - a body, a machine. All I needed was fuel.

We need dreams to survive. We all need dreams and nobody knows why. Maybe its a mental scandisk / defrag at the end of a session as the Human Machine. Maybe God’s fucking with us. If there is a God.

I couldn’t remember my dreams. The alcoholic comas I achieved failed to satisfy like a string of cheap handjobs from the sleep fairy. The quest for sleep on furtive street corners, burgling my soul and selling whatever I could find to fuel my addiction. The logistics of this were simple. If pushers sold sleep on street corners I’d be feeding a narcolepsy habit.

If sleep were a religion I’d be there living in a commune wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and channeling 90% of my earnings into the Cult Of Infinite Sleep.

It wasn’t the quantity of sleep I needed : it was the quality. My sleep was diluted and broken. I wanted, needed my fix of Class A oblivion.

I worshipped a pristine white duvet. I fantasised of sheep jumping up and around over my head. All I need was the sweet oblivion of the drug I was addicted to and couldn’t get a fix of. All around me, the normal sleepers pushed their comfort onto me. Like a single man at a wedding, my face was being rubbed into the shit of other peoples contentment. And I wanted to be a fly. I wanted to eat the sweet coma-tasting shit.

The problem came when I stopped whatever it was that I was doing. The essay was completed. The book finished. The project over. Like a touring rock band, a juggernaut that just keeps going, the train kept going - powering over the barriers, jumping the tracks. With a momentum that big, that strong, I got the bends. I needed to decompress. If I came up too quickly I would swell and explode. I was headfucked.

I’d fooled myself. I claimed I could quit anytime I wanted. But I couldn’t. I was addicted to exhaustion. My body buzzed with the perpetual state of kicking that was. I looked like a junkie on cold turkey, but this was the buzz I craved.

Years of sleep abuse and consciousness addiction had resulted in permanent damage to me. I thought the world was meant to look like this. The world was meant to be grey, tiny, fuzzy at the edges, with everything pale and lacking. Where minor infractions were meaningless, where physical pain, hunger, exhaustion were overcome by a mantra of weariness. The whole world was smothered in insomniac vaseline. My stomach ceased rumbling - I cannibalised myself. I was eating myself from the inside. My eyes became red, angry roadmaps.

At the sleep bank I was always overdrawn. I was always owed a few hours. A few hours became a few days. Became years. And those missing years take their toll on me. Each of us only have so many heartbeats. Each of us only have so many orgasms. So many hangovers. So many late nights in our souls, before we expire. Nobody knows how many there are. but each of us has a finite number. Every late night I steal now, I take from my future.

The half-life of insomnia is permanent and infinite. Like nuclear waste, it could last to the end of our lifetime, or five hundred, a thousand, a million years later.

In my sleepless state, the world is fuzzy. Consciousness starts to curl at the edges. Sound and vision becomes distorted. Broken. Sleep starts to infect my waking life. Every second I am awake the world begins to resemble my REM-state. I need sleep, yet I am at war with myself. The one thing I need I can’t have, and the only thing stopping me, is me. I’m out of control.

Being unloved has dangerous side-effects. Sleeplessness, self-pity and chronic masturbation. The problem was I couldn’t quit anytime I liked, anytime I wanted : I could only quit when someone else liked, when someone else wanted. Sleep and love were the two things I needed, the two things I craved, wanted more than anything, the two things I could not provide for myself, the only two things I could never take, but could only be given. And however much I had, I always wanted more. More. More. More.

I read the message again, trying to work who it is, and how she got my number.