i don't sleep well at night but i wake up at 6:30 am
slow mornings, bed-rotting, dreams & longing
One of the perks of not working is the freedom to plan life to your liking.
At the beginning of the year, when deciding how I wanted to spend my sabbatical, I devised my ideal schedule:
Two months later, I look back at what I wrote and laugh. My days don’t go like what I planned at all.
It’s not for lack of trying. I (avoiding being self-deprecating here) accomplish most of the activities listed above. But in reality, my days usually go more like this:
I’m no stranger to forming good habits or kicking bad habits (just to relearn them), but the archnemesis of my habits – bed-rotting – prevails time and time again. For someone who quit her job to free up time and do “what I want to do,” I can’t bring myself to leap out of bed right away and embrace my newfound freedom.
When I stare at the ceiling, I’m staring at an hourglass. Watching sand pile up. Waiting for something to happen.
Languishing or luxuriating?
In an Asian-American immigrant household, ‘doing nothing’ would have to top the list of cardinal sins you could commit.
My mom embodies the virtue of efficiency, clearly reflected in her superhuman ability to get out of bed when she wakes up for work. There’s no dilly-dallying, no rolling around in bed, or slamming the snooze button for an extra five minutes of sleep. Oftentimes, she leaves home, thermos of coffee in hand, before the sun has even risen.
In my everlasting admiration for my mom, I try to emulate her ways. I even set my alarm at a reasonable hour since time is precious and easily squandered (and definitely not because I’m a notoriously light sleeper).
But I wake up groaning, groggy and grumpy. Even the promises of beautiful sunrises, non-sweaty runs, and iced lattes fail to entice me out of bed. All I want to do is stick my head under my pillow and curse at the morning for arriving too soon.
Does this make me a member of the tang ping movement? Am I sliding down the slippery slope that is bai lan, allowing myself to sink in the world’s collective despair? Is life truly something to look forward to when there’s climate change, war, income inequality, and genocide to contend with?
I sink further into my mattress. Even without a foam topper, my bed is a cocoon. My blankets hug me lovingly, warding off the morning chill I despise so much.
I recently heard, “Our bodies hold so much wisdom.” And there’s something about the delicious curl of your spine as you hold onto your second pillow, perfectly conformed to your embrace, and the equally sumptuous second sleep (when you manage to fall back asleep and enjoy another twenty blissful minutes) that makes me wonder if getting up and preparing for the day needs to happen so soon.
Learning to (properly) unwind
Despite my morning slothfulness, I pride myself on being high-functioning. Even against my will, whether I’m ill or depressed or on the verge of a mental breakdown, I’ve always been able to perform. But I’ve always viewed my inability to wake up and start my day right away as the last hurdle in becoming a fully realized, productive member of society. And, I’ve told myself for the past 29 years, it’s in my best interest to at least try to clear this last obstacle.
Otherwise, I risk becoming one of them.
The slackers. The layabouts. The laggards. Those who actively partake in inactivity. Snorlax (so much potential if only it would wake up from its nap), Garfield (a cat, which is all you need to know), and “The Dude” (who is only pulled into action once thugs beat him up and piss on his rug) belong to this group neither venerated nor reviled. Instead, they’re usually regarded as hopeless, if not humorous, causes.
Sharing this designation strikes me with dread.
Then there’s the narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Now there’s a bonafide professional bed-rotter. Who else brilliantly leverages her incompetent psychiatrist for unfettered access to prescription pills? Who else describes the sensation of falling asleep so delectably that your mouth begins to water?
Although she performs below the bare minimum at her art gallery job and neglects her relationships, the narrator is propelled to action when it comes to sleep.
“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.” – Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
I emphatically nod my head in agreement. This woman gets it. Who wouldn’t want to wake up from a deep sleep refreshed, a whole new person ripe with possibilities and optimism, a butterfly bursting forth prettily from its cocoon?
I no longer want to suffer bad sleep. I want to get excited about sleeping! I will become the ideal sleeper and:
Breathe through my nose (no more mouth breathing for this one!)
Get off electronics an hour before shuteye (including reading books on Libby -sad noises-)
Lower the temperature (or live in SF lmao)
Meditate (alternative: put on that 9 hr audiobook you’ve been dying to listen to, knowing full well you will not pay attention and hope you absorb the plot through sheer osmosis before falling asleep in the first 20 minutes)
The harder I try to optimize my sleep, the harder rest resists me. Ironically, I place too much pressure on an activity devoid of all pressure. Maybe the more you (try to) optimize your time for productivity’s sake, the more difficult it is to fully rest.
Some years ago, I asked my sister what she did on vacation since her travel photos (beaches, bikinis, and Zimmermann) were so different from mine (an incoherent mess).
“Oh, we just lay by the water, sleep, and tan.”
“That’s all you do?”
“Well, we go out to eat. Drink wine. Shop too.”
“And you do this for…. four weeks.”
“Sounds about right.”
I shook my head in disbelief. But there were bookstores, museums, vintage stores, botanical gardens, markets, cathedrals, and temples to explore! And so many concerts and bars and clubs to dance the night away in. So what if you come back home more drained than ever? Was it really a vacation if you didn’t squeeze as much out of your time off as possible?
But the side effect of getting older is learning to take my time. Listening to my body lest I blow out my bad knee. Being present – which is what my sister, more than vacationing, truly excels at.
Last December, I spent some time in South Korea after a social bender in Taiwan. My grand plans to explore Seoul were promptly tossed out in favor of holing up in my Airbnb. Each morning, I woke up in pitch darkness. After expending just enough energy to turn the lamp on, I stayed in bed, consuming copious amounts of fanfiction and YouTube videos. Once dusk had set, I emerged from the apartment like some decrepit vampire in search of my one meal of the day.
My unintentional fasting sharpened my awareness, and I started to pay attention. Commuters sat on the train in silence, a strange camaraderie of its own. Huddled in my layers, I joined the crowds in the streets, resentful of the winter chill. All around me, lights warmed the insides of cafés. University students and newly graduated professionals sipped at their perfectly foamed lattes.
I walked into a grocery store. A bag of Korean-style Hot Cheetos caught me by surprise, so I picked it up and brought it to the cash register. Nearby, fresh produce received the bounty of regularly doled-out mist. Dew rippled on the ridges of their green leaves.
Then there was the slow walk from the subway station back to my apartment. Plastic bags tugged at my chilled fingers. Anticipation rose inside me. All that separated me from shucking off my boots, digging into rosé chicken pasta, and watching Netflix were two flights of stairs, covered in slick rainwater as I clambered up, keys ready to open the door.
Memories can be made out of scampering around or idling about, so long as you’re locked into the moment.
Am I dreaming?
A popular question that gets tossed around my friend circles:
Assume your decision won’t affect your health. Would you rather give up eating or sleeping?
Most people opt to give up sleep. Who wouldn’t want eight more hours a day to do whatever you want? To finally do what you’ve always wanted to do, but had to put aside due to more pressing priorities?
Plus, eating is great. It’s a wonderful means to bond with others, and the sensory pleasure one derives from tasting their favorite food is incomparable. In fact, I do enjoy eating more than sleeping.
Yet, I hesitate to give up sleeping. Or rather, I hesitate to give up dreaming.
I’m not an expert in lucid dreaming or dream analysis, but I’ve been the (un)grateful recipient of vivid dreams for as long as I can remember. Love, death, loss, grief, freedom, ecstasy – I’ve experienced them all and more in the recesses of my subconscious.
Some dreams feel even more real than anything I’ve ever experienced in real life. They have permanently embedded themselves into my psyche, becoming core memories even though they never happened. It probably explains the feeling of sehnsucht – “this desire for our own far-off country,” in the words of C.S. Lewis – that has plagued me since time immemorial.
Sometimes, when the wick of my longing for this “other place” burns for too long, I worry. Dare I forsake reality in favor of my inner world? Am I forgoing the opportunity to find fulfillment and happiness out there, with people who I know and love, for a place accessible only by sleep?
Part of me says, to be truly present, I must practice awareness and pay attention to what is in front of me. Yet, as my eyelashes flutter, fighting to worm my way back in, I can’t help but feel seduced by that strange space between utter darkness and waking consciousness. I want to stay.
It’s a connection I don’t want to sever.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.
We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.
But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.
For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited." – C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
I shared the bed with my mom until I was six. Even after I got my own room, if I knew my mom had the day off (the only days she’d stay in bed), I would sneak over to her room and snuggle against her as the morning light filtered through the windows. Flecks of dust danced through the air, coated gold in sunbeams.
Everything about that room was soft and warm. Cotton sheets rubbing against our legs. The pillows sinking under our heads. The scent of gardenias rising from my mom’s hair curling around me as we held each other, watching Pride & Prejudice.
If you’ve made it down here, thanks for reading /ᐠ˶> ﻌ<˶ᐟ\ I don’t have a straightforward conclusion to all the above, but I think that’s fine. This is a thematic arc of my life, and it’s one I don’t mind wrangling with.
But poll-of-the-essay! Foreshadowed earlier, but what would you give up: eating or sleeping?
As someone who struggles massively with sleep, and just as much with waking up, this is so relatable. Routine crumbles so easily when you can't keep on top of a consistent sleep schedule, at least for me. For me too, it feels like the last obstacle to overcome before reaching that mythical productivity of adulthood. Somewhere buried beneath the irregular hours of sleep and sleeplessness I know there's a morning person just wanting to enjoy the day's early light. Meditation helps sometimes. I'll keep trying to be that morning person.