Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir - Softcover

Chapter One: In Utero

I grew up in a family where the question "How'd you sleep?" was a topic of genuine reflection at the breakfast table. My five sisters and I each rated the last night's particular qualities -- when we fell asleep, how often we woke, what we dreamed, if we dreamed. My father's response influenced the family's mood for the day: if "lousy," the rest of us felt lousy, too. If there's such a thing as an insomnia gene, Dad passed it on to me, along with his green eyes and Irish melancholy.

I lay awake as a young boy, my mind racing like the spell-check function on a computer, scanning all data, lighting on images, moments, fragments of conversation, impossible to turn off. As a sleeping aid, I would try to recall my entire life -- a straight narrative from first to last incident -- thereby imposing order on the inventory of desire and memory. My story always started with a plane ride from Minneapolis to Spokane -- a trip that actually occurred, the recollection of which, however, may be imaginary. I was no older than three. But there I am regardless, in memory as if in a movie, still gazing out the window of a jet.

If my boyhood story didn't lull me to sleep, I'd sneak into the den, where I could find my mother, watching Johnny Carson and drinking Coca-Cola, simultaneously smoking Pall Malls and folding laundry. For her, I suspect, not sleeping offered time on her own. For me, visiting Mom after midnight was the only time I had her to myself in such a big family. She never shooed me back to bed. I helped her fold socks, she gave me a glass of Coke. Some combination of the two helped me fall asleep.

After she had put me to bed, I would occasionally wander back again, sleepwalking. I remembered nothing of these night visits. I learned of them at the breakfast table, next morning, where they were a source of laughter from my sisters that left me uneasy. Thirty years later, my mother still recalls how oddly I acted: I did not sit down with her, didn't speak or respond to her voice. I appeared to be looking for something. Without waking me, she would gently lead me back to my room. This sleep disorder, a "parasomnia" that rarely appears in adults, lasted about two years.

In some ways, I find sleepwalking more perplexing than sleeplessness -- perhaps because it afflicted me while I was so young, then let me go, never to return again. If the insomniac is a shadow of his daylight self, existing nightlong on nothing but the fumes of consciousness, then the somnambulist is like an animal whose back leg drags a steel trap -- the mind is fleeing and the body is inextricably attached.

Where did I want to go? Out of that house, I imagine. Away from the person I saw myself becoming. Toward a dreamed-up boy, with a new story, a different version of myself.

Now, halfway through my life, I still wander at night. I still seek the peerless soporific. Everybody has a cure to recommend, whether it's warm milk, frisky sex, or melatonin. One friend solemnly prescribes whiffing dirty socks before turning out the lights. I find, though, that home remedies are no more effective than aphrodisiacs. Sleeping pills can force the body into unconsciousness, it's true. I've had my jags on Halcion and Xanax, Ambien and Restoril. I've slept many times on those delicious, light-blue pillows. But the body is never really tricked. The difference between drugged and natural sleep eventually reveals itself, like the difference between an affair and true romance. It shows up in your eyes. Sleep acts, in this regard, more like an emotion than a bodily function. As with desire, it resists pursuit. Sleep must come find you.

Nevertheless, I look for it. If not my own, then the sleep of others. You might find me on the subway staring as you come out of a snooze. You'd see no guilt on my face for watching so shamelessly, only fascination. When people doze in public, the human animal comes out. They burrow into their own clothing or nestle into a friend's shoulder. Undefended from their own small indiscretions, they scratch, grunt, fart, drool, grit their teeth. People know this happens and try to hide themselves: they pull down a hat or put on sunglasses; duck under a newspaper or drape an arm over the face. Left exposed, it is as if they're caught naked: a hand instinctively reaches up to shield their eyes, where it often remains until the lids open.

Sleep also has the uncanny ability both to infantilize and to age, which is especially strange to see in the person with whom you are intimate. After a night of insomnia, sometimes I stand at the bedroom door, coffee in hand, watching my partner of ten years, Steve, sleep. One morning, he's curled up in the fetal position, legs tucked up to his chest, arms hugging a pillow. He looks as vulnerable as a baby. With a snort, he rolls onto his back, the planes of his face fall into shadows, and suddenly he's middle-aged. Another morning, Steve sleeps so soundlessly I have to make sure he's still breathing. I tiptoe in and hover over him. I hold my own breath, not making a sound. Yet it is as if his sleeping self recognizes me -- it vanishes in a heartbeat. He wakes up, startled, wondering what the hell I'm doing.

Sleep scientists spend their entire waking lives engaged in this kind of surveillance. They may stay up all night just to watch someone awaken. They treat bizarre and dangerous disorders -- narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea, African sleeping sickness, fatal familial insomnia -- as well as the everyday sleep disturbances of people like me. I've looked into their findings, in search of answers that my own body refuses to divulge. I've studied the work of early sleep researchers, along with books on anatomy, mythology, mental disorders, aging. While none of what I've learned has fully unraveled the mystery of sleep, least of all in my own life, I have come to see that sleep itself tells a story.

The ancient Greeks envisioned sleep to be Hypnos, the twin brother of death, Thanatos. A minor god, born of Night, Hypnos lived in a dark, underworld cave on the island of Lemnos. The River of Forgetfulness flowed through the cavern where Hypnos lay on pillows surrounded by his many sons, including Morpheus, the dream-bringer. Unlike his twin, Hypnos was considered a friend of mortals, a healer of body and mind. He took different forms as he wandered the earth -- a bird or a child, but most often a benevolent warrior carrying a horn, from which he would drip a sleep elixir. The Greeks apparently took his gifts for granted. There were neither temples devoted to Hypnos nor songs to thank him. No cult arose to worship sleep, which seems particularly odd, if not irreverent, for surely there were ancient insomniacs.

A Greek physician named Alcmaeon, from the sixth century B.C., is credited with the first recorded theory on the cause of sleep. He thought it was due to blood vessels of the brain becoming engorged. Aristotle, two hundred years later, viewed sleep as the opposite of wakefulness, one of the contraries that "are seen always to present themselves in the same subject, and to be affections of the same: examples are -- health and sickness, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness, sight and blindness, hearing and deafness." In a sense, Aristotle took the Greek myth and recast it: now, sleep was the evil twin of wakefulness. "Sleep," he noted, "is evidently a privation of waking." Basing his theory on personal observation rather than traditional thought, Aristotle concluded that sleep was the result of vapors generated by the digestion of food, which then rose to the brain. The bigger the meal, the greater the vapors, the sleepier one got.

Aristotle's ideas remained influential for centuries. Experts who followed devoted themselves to hunting down sleep to its anatomical root, if only in hope of extending wakefulness. If not in the stomach, then p