Being Awake (but not in the good way)

I’m awake in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep.

Ezra Bayda once wrote that he counts his exhales backwards to zero from fifty and that this activates his sympathetic nervous system which then takes over from his worried and anxious mind. I’ve been trying this sporadically for several weeks at night and I want to report that sometimes it works. Sometimes I’m asleep before I get to zero. Sometimes I can feel a shift in my brain where the energy moves from activated and anxious to stable and at ease. It’s quite nice. Sometimes.

But not last night.

I woke up at two a.m. to the sound of fireworks. For five minutes the successive explosions echoed through my silent neighborhood. I wondered about the young guys (my assumption) that were setting them off. Was their intention to disturb the easy sleep of the old folks? Did they set a few off then run to another location to avoid the police who might be coming? Were the police coming? (In that moment, I pictured the police as two reasonable guys in a car who would accost the perpetrators and restore quiet to my night—not, I’m aware as I write this, as a enforcers of a system of inequality based on skin color and economic class.)

I thought I would easily go back to sleep. It had been a long day and we were already packed to leave on vacation the next morning. But after a while, I turned over and realized I was awake. I tried to stay cool and curious. I’ve been sleeping through the night these days and thought this would be over soon. But it wasn’t.

For the next hour or two, I lay in a state of semi-consciousness. I did the counting backwards on the exhalation thing—I must have stopped and started three or four times. The instruction is, if you get lost to begin where you left off you don’t have to start again at fifty, you just begin where you left off. I would gather my intention and begin counting downward only to find myself some unspecified time later thinking darkly about some pressing issue of my life and relationships.

Realizing I had wandered away into a realm of anxious thinking, I tried another strategy I just read from a Buddhist teacher. He said, when you realize you have wandered away from a gentle focus on the breath to pause and calm your mind and relax the tightness in your head. I thought these were wonderful instructions when I read them and I almost wrote them down. But last night, my intention to calm my mind and relax the tightness in my head produced minimal to no change in my experience.

The things I think about during these occasional nightly rumination sessions are familiar. I am compelled to think about specific unresolved issues (content varies with the night). I strategize endless conversations to get to the heart of things and set things at rest. It’s hard work. My mind circles over and over the same territory. A lot has to do with locating blame. Something is wrong and it’s either my fault or someone else’s fault. I am the self appointed sheriff and my job is to find the bad actors and set things right.

I know, in these sleepless thinking sessions, that thinking is not the way out, but I can’t help myself. I am mildly curious about how long I will be awake. I try to ‘look around’ and learn what I can here in the underworld. I’m not very successful. I find some comfort in Norman Fischer’s phrase ‘Sometimes, this is how people feel.’ This at least locates my solitary burden squarely in the family of human beings.

I also try to trust that these places of obsessive thinking are my body’s way of working things out. I am chewing the cud of my life—trying to digest the roughage into useable bits of nutrition. I imagine how patiently cows spend a lazy afternoon chewing and chewing the grass they ate in the morning. Not one of them complains about the repetitive activity. They’re happy to stand there chewing—perhaps adding in the occasional pissing and farting for variation.

But me, I have to work to be patient—to realize that this is my only life—here in the dark and uncomfortable night. I look at the clock occasionally. I notice that this place is not continuous. I feel awake, but I suspect I am drifting in and out of awareness, even as I keep prospective track of ‘how long I was awake in the middle of the night.’

I open my eyes and it’s quarter after five—late for me. I have no idea how or when I got to sleep. It feels like I was just thinking about the many problems of my life. And I wonder, do I manufacture these problems to keep myself entertained while my brain just happens to be switched into worry mode? Or are these endless issues the roughage that sometimes need multiple chewing sessions?