Writing in the Dark

I've always been jealous of people who don't need a full eight hours of sleep. It's a trait that is in my genes, but I, unfortunately missed it. I do love to sleep. I covet days of old where naps were welcome, indeed essential. And sometimes I will sleep to pass the time just because I like it. Even to my best intentions and desire to read and write, I easily give into sleep when I could potentially resist it for those endeavors. It has long been my 'skill' to be able to sleep anytime anyplace given fifteen minutes of concentration.

Several of my friends through the years have had the problem of only "needing" four hours of sleep. They cannot keep their bodies at rest any longer most nights. I still am not sure what that means. I can count on two sets of phalanges how many times in my life I haven't been able to sleep. Most occurrences involve periods of extreme amounts of stress in which my body was in some sort of physical trauma - often after a college basketball game for better or for worse. But the things that they have been able to delve into to pass the time have been of an interesting intellectual nature worth envying.

Night is full of thoughts that seem to only reveal themselves in the saturated silence. What is it about the dark? About knowing the world around me sleeps that leads to revelation and depth of conclusion. I can go places now that I cannot when light streams into my windows. Indeed it rids my writing of the shadows essential to what I would say and so my topics change with the hour. It's not that late right now. It's not that early. I'm waiting for friends driving in from out of state to arrive, and I feel as though I've not slept at all. Their arrival has been on the edge of my mind preventing me from going past that thought into a more subconscious level of sleep. My clarity and vivid level of dreams often skews my reality towards close friends I rarely see but think of daily. I wake up often remembering dreams that are so real they make me question reality versus my subconscious playtime visions. I don't have time in the morning to sit and let conclusive statements come to me from those dreams. So I push them back out of my thoughts into my subconscious to stew more and inevitably come again to the surface. Like the night and its shadows, that part of my mind holds thoughts that the light of awakening chases away.

The deeper I venture into the night, the more I deprive myself of sleep, the closer I get to the edge of reason-an edge where anxiety and fatigue breed a frantic pace of thought. I've always maintained that some of my favorite writing of my own, perhaps by others even as I am unaware of the hour that Hemingway wrote, is done under the influence of some abnormal substance or situation. The highest stress, perhaps some maryjane, lack of sleep. This is when I look back later upon words written and wonder from what layer of mind they came from.

It's a great idea - to make a sometimes habit of getting myself up in the night to think. But at the moment there is little to interrupt me. Tomorrow is not another stamp of the everyday that will bring with it work concerns and all my to-dos. It's the first middle-of-the-night before a long holiday weekend. I have no worries. If I did, it would be like the deadline of a paper written overnight with the eight am due hour looming. The hours would close in upon me reminding me of conscious, daylight obligations. Ruining it. So when I get the opportunity by chance and circumstance rather by biological sleep requirements, I will try to get it all out quickly before sunrise chases it away.