Oh insomnia. As a condition I regard it not so much medical as metaphysical. As summer has arrived I find every day I can't sleep progressively by each hour. Close friends who have known me for long call me a vampire or joke about my permanent jet lag. If I do get to sleep these days, some strange thing will happen to relieve me of sleep.

Like this morning, first a stray delivery person arrived with breakfast for someone else (and I'm sure the smell of bacon woke me up even more). Then I go back to sleep. Have dreams about New York under attack; for the second time in a week. The next thing I know I'm awake again and I hear as I come out of this dream fighter jets flying perilously low. I'm awake and this is real and I'm completely rattled, running to the backyard to look at the sky. But I forget, obliviously, that it's Memorial Day and it's just an airshow. The spell of sleep is broken for the second time and I'm wide awake now. Grumpily, with that physical feeling they always use to describe Gollum: "feeling stretched out and thin". I'm meaning to send someone a simple txt message upon their landing at an airport in another city. Last year I was absent from home four months of the year, flying alone a lot of course. Since pretty much everyone now turns their phone on as soon as they land I think it's always nice to have someone far away say hello when you do. Next thing I know I wake up a few hours later, phone in hand, having typed into it "bur i'm so sleeply" and totally missed that opportunity. And I have a headache. My other friend calls me who's supposed to see a movie with me. He's waking up too late as well. Best laid plans lie in bed longer.

Later this evening I watch a documentary about insomnia and have to shut it off. It's like swimming in a mirror, watching the condition reflected with experimental filmmaking techniques. The tossing and turning, the inability to turn off the mind at night, the constant need for some kind of information or research that propels me on tangents. The attempts at remedies.

But for all this, there's something I strangely value in my insomnia. Valuable memories from moments when the rest of the world was mostly asleep, the bright deep blue that washes over everything in those amazing hours before and after the sun comes round. Passing fellow insomniacs or night shift workers in the night, the strange sort of mood and rhythm, the confessional whispery speech. I've seen violent things, beautiful things, entire cities waking up. I've stumbled with friends laughing in the middle of the night glad I live in a place that supports our bad habits. Nocturnal life is a state of mind, especially if you spend it mostly alone. It's like getting to see the universe from a space capsule.

But if you make contact with fellow travellers there's some strange bond I can't explain. Everyone I know who's a night owl knows this, and we have an odd camraderie.



One of the films that most made an impact on me upon arriving in Europe was Leos Carax's Les Amants Du Pont Neuf, called The Lovers on the Bridge here and sporting some gaudy horrendous Miramax cover art that makes it look like a mannered French romance. It's anything but. And it's full of moments that are all about the beauty of being nocturnal. Carax's film before this, Mauvais Sang has almost half of the film devoted to a boy and a girl forced into proximity keeping each other company through the night, and somehow conjures up bliss from just that. This one has some of the same mood but there's something harsh playing against the beauty, like a sensation that you want to fall madly in love but you know it's going to be dangerous. It's an odd film in that it's full of personal hints but you know it isn't really personal at the same time; it's a movie in love with being awake in a city at night but the main character is conflicted by his inability to sleep.

Beyond that it's an exceptional, unique movie. I prefer Amelie as a Parisian romance, but this movie is indescribably good. And there are so many moments that just strike you as something you've never seen before or since.

I watched it this week with someone who did get it, a fellow nocturnal person. And I hadn't seen it in years and I realized this is something that more people should see if they're attuned that way.

Here's a trailer for Mauvais Sang (called The Night is Young here). Now I want to watch this again.



The Surrealists and the Dadists, I read, used sleep deprivation to make themselves that slight bit of hallucinatory. I don't do it on purpose, but I understand the sensation. There is something, for all the affliction, wonderful about it which feels like a guilty secret. Right now it keeps me company while I whittle away hours writing.