Insomnia

Somehow, the bed was a larger, wilder and more exciting place then
anywhere else I knew or had heard about. It's boundaries were set only
by my imagination. I loved it there. The darkness didn't scare me, it
was my canvas, and the quiet didn't worry me, because it made my
whispers sound like tiny waves, sending shivers down my spine. Above my
spaceship, or boat, or racing car, was a perfect view of the night-sky
through the glass of my shaky window. When I didn't care for
adventures, or planning, I would lie on my back instead, finding faces
in the stars, or listening carefully for the footsteps and coughs of
passers by. I always told myself, that it wasn't that case that I
couldn't sleep, more that I didn't need or particularly want to. My bed
could be anything I wished it to be. Why miss out on that?

Then I grew up a tiny bit. Not enough to be classed above a child, or
to attend anything other then first school, but enough to realise that
my word of spaceships and sail-boats didn't quite exist anymore. I
adopted the notion that using my special hours in bed to play was
somehow immoral, and most certainly very childish. I had the unsettling
feeling that outside my window, there lurked people and things that
weren't particularly nice or magical at all. I began to worry. Worry
that animals were being hurt. Worry that my parents might die, or that
other boy and girls had no Mummies and Daddies. Worry that I might get
hurt, that my friends might get hurt, that I might be unhappy, or make
someone else unhappy. Trying to super-impose myself into a world of
sunshine and merriment made me feel sick. The darkness seemed to close
in on me, and whispering into the night made me think of evil witches
or snakes, slowly slithering under my sheets and up my nose as I sleep.
And that was the problem. I didn't sleep. The slow realisation of
living in an imperfect world is something that, in varying degrees and
guises, comes to trouble every young child at some point in their
life's. But for me, it felt over-whelming. Like I couldn't breathe. A
strange sense of being trapped. And I couldn't sleep. I stayed-up
beyond my parents. I would close my eyes, and breathe slightly as my
Mother kissed me goodnight, slowly perfecting the art of pretending to
sleep. Then I would stay up until my eyes were red, tossing and
turning, making futile attempts at not entertaining thoughts of death
and loneliness in a horrible, careless world.

And then to my teens. Again, sleep was patchy, hit and miss. Again, I
filled to hours with thought. By this time, of course, my thoughts were
almost all self-centred. Fretting over relations with my peers,
panicking over tiny things I had said or did to embarrass myself that
day. What people thought of me, what I would become, what was so
despicable in both myself and everyone else. A little bundle of
disgust, the same strange sense of entrapment and self-loathing.
Endless analysis. The usual, typical teenage hang-ups and fears. A
faint awareness of life in world full of people that would lie and
cheat, and a constant, dulling fear of turning out the same. You
remember. Problem was, I still couldn't sleep. I still wiped away tears
of sheer frustration, long into the early morning, re-arranging my
pillows, swapping from my left side to my right. In the summer,
sunlight and bird-song came as if to torture me. Thinking about my
secret bed-world of years gone by made me cringe by day, but at night,
I longed only for them to return.

To present day. The song remains the same. Last night, I remember
painfully watching a programme on Channel Four about people who
disappeared. People who walked out on their family and friends,
creating a new identity for themselves. I vaguely remember disliking
the sound of the voice-over's voice, yet feeling strangely drawn to a
woman who told us how she ran away at 14 and has never regretted it
since. Such bizarre extracts of early-morning television are often the
closest things I have to dreams. The sun came up and the birds sang, as
always, and I groaned into my mattress. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I
make short-films with my video-camera using Star-wars figures, or
perform a concert, playing my guitar for hours. Sometimes I'll do
something quite ridiculous, like fix my alarm-clock or iron clothes I
never wear. More often then that, I read, or search the radio-waves for
a French woman with a voice that sometimes makes me fall asleep.

Then sometimes, if the day has gone fairly smoothly, and there is
nothing I've heard or no-one I've talked to that's made me sad, I'll
try to find my space-ship again. I don't often get there though. But I
get close. I get close enough to remember, if for just a second, how I
knew more as the smallest child about being happy and at peace, then I
have ever or will ever know since. And if I strain hard enough, I can
hear the distant roar of my motor-car, or the see the wonders of the
universe outside my ship. Then I get sad, because with every year of my
life that passes, these sacred dreams get more and more vague and
harder to grasp. And in my heart I know, that I'll never swim my boat
across the ocean, or dance like a fairy, across the purple stars,
beneath the tranquil glow of the ever-grinning moon.