Midnight at the Oasis
It used to be that I would simply lean back at bedtime and fall sweetly into sleep, watching bright cinematic dreams unfold until daylight touched my face. Not anymore. “A good night’s sleep” has become an elusive sort of fantasy. I slip in and out of watery slumber, acutely aware of the winking face of the clock at various appalling hours -- 3:23 this morning, as a matter of fact.
I worry, of course. I worry about everything from global warming to health insurance in retirement to the what-was-I-thinking dress I ordered and need to ship back whenever I can get to the post office. And I realize these are not even remotely on the same scale, but all of it looms large in the night. Ghosts walk through the room, old regrets come and sit upon my chest, a chorus of uncertainties assembles and demands my attention.
Everything conspires to keep me awake. There’s a mouse in the wall scurrying about with quick staccato movements, scratching and scrambling, disturbingly industrious, disturbingly near. The wind blows a watering can across the deck, a train rumbles in the distance, and the coyotes gather for one of their yap-fests.
There are frogs singing beneath the window. I never thought much about frogs before and now the whole atmosphere seems filled with their sound. I wonder what makes them sing all night. I make a note to myself to Google frogs in the morning.
“Geez Cyn,” writes my friend Steve, a fellow insomniac, “frogs sing all night for the same reason single people hang out in bars all night. Do you really need to Google that?”
Frog music is beautiful, however, compared to the tune in my head. I am inevitably infected by day with the virus of a really bad song that gets stuck in my mind and becomes the soundtrack for the night. Sometimes it’s a song that has lain dormant since the 1970s and inexplicably comes to life to torment me. Last night it was “Midnight at the Oasis”. Need I say more?
Billy Collins wrote a poem about those songs that get snagged in your head – he titled it “More Than A Woman” but admitted that there were plenty of other “cloying and vapid” possibilities. He describes the experience as “a tape looping/over the spools of my brain/a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun/mad fan belt of a tune.” It’s a form of insanity that certainly occurs in broad daylight but is particularly excruciating in the night."
“Midnight at the oasis...send your camel to bed...shadows painting our faces..."
My friend Lindsey, who can’t sleep either, sent me a review by William Howarth of a book called At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch that talks about the lost culture of night as experienced before the Industrial Revolution. Night was supposedly a precious time to work for oneself, tell stories, or meditate on new ideas.
“Families often took a ‘first sleep’ up to midnight,” Howarth reports, “and, after a wakeful period of one or two hours, a ‘second sleep’ until dawn. During the interval they might read or write diary entries, usually about their dreams…”
He summarizes a central idea of the book: “Night offers an alternate side to life, liberating and renewing forces that daylight represses…”
Liberating and renewing forces? Lindsey thinks we might do well with this perspective. “It’s a new frontier for us to explore,” she suggests optimistically, “Let’s embrace it.”
I can’t wait to pass this along to Steve. “Embrace the night!” I urge him.
Monte is convinced that Steve’s fitful nights have something to do with the Diet Cokes he drinks all day, but Steve gave them up for awhile and didn’t see any difference.
“So I tried the 'embrace the night' stuff last night,” he writes in an email. “I was up at two a.m. watching infomercials and eating Cheerios. I found out that you can buy a $117,000 house by paying just $246 in unpaid back taxes. Tonight I'm calling that number on my screen. If I can't sleep I may as well get rich quick.”
As for me, there’s a pile of books by my bedside and I have a fancy new night light and sometimes I actually read. Occasionally I give up and get up, admitting defeat, and I head upstairs to my computer. But most of the time I’m just tangled up in bedclothes, pounding on pillows, slowly losing my mind.
“And you won't need no camel, no no..when I take you for a ride...come on now, Cactus is our friend...he'll point out the way...come on, 'til the evening ends..."