Still on the OTC side of the barnyard, Benadryl could work also, or any of the countless antihistamines — nonprescription sleep pills, the allergy medicines, the “night aids” and bedtime versions of other basic medications — Tylenol PM and what have you — each of which, by turns, I sucked down, depending on what there was around. Four or five Benadryl felt like light to lay inside, a humming, the warm rubbed rind of its waving coming on, if still not causing the over-thinking to black out, then at least there lapping at my body like a blanket, waiting — or seeming waiting, to one of the other me inside of me — for some small lapse in the obsess-chain, a slow down, so that therein we could slip in, gone, in witching hour. And the more you take the more you believe, the more you need to make yourself think it’s setting in, though underneath all this expectation what you don’t hear so often is that increasing antihistamine dosage doesn’t cause a comparable increase in response. While they benefit from having no side effects, and working better than a placebo, there’s only so much gain to glean from eating up those basic agents. A pat on the head, a little padding, but ultimately, through most hours, little more than something like a jacket, worn.
Worn, too, are the books that offer logic for the exit from the barrage, constrained advices aimed less at direct motions and more like overall life guides: Set up regular bedtimes and rising times, including holidays and weekends, certain books will tell you, milking on the body’s wanting to be programmed, made a box. The funny thing about this advice, though, is that another common piece, often listed in the same spiel, is: Don’t get in bed until you’re tired. Don’t spend extra time in bed awake reading or watching TV; only sleep until you’re rested; don’t nap. The wider logic here would be to set up a time in scheduling when you are usually tired enough on most days to be ready when it hits, but inside the wide strain of stimulus, continuous redressing, constant input, and so on, it seems harder now than ever — and again growing by the minute — to predict where the body is meant to be. Not to mention the frequent further advice of Don’t flop in the bed for longer than thirty minutes; if you can’t sleep get up and read or watch TV until you’re tired, which has the benefit of removing the frustration period, but also further displaces the timeline. The people I know who seem to tend toward those regular settings are those programmed by their nine-to-five, most of whom having been at it so long they know to fit their obsessing and consuming into a specific set of slots — I watch TV now, I shop now, I eat at this time, when I want to go to bed I go to bed. Concerns of territorializing the environment of the sleep state. Building inertia, consecrating space; the idea being that if you can decenter the errored condition in the blood, by negotiation and conditioning, rather than meds, you can change the expectation, the nature, and emerge clean. Schedule worry time during the day, suggests another fragment of advice, which alone seems so insane and off base, as if anxiety were a muscle one could gather up and outlay only in a 3' × 3' square section of the dining room partitioned off under thick glass — though really, such rigor and demonstrative restraint seems cozy, even expected, in the fields of office buildings and neon shopping space, where behavior out of the frame could not only cause one to look bananas, but could result in further repercussions, psychic leakage.
Another manual goes so far as to define mathematical procedures for determining sleep efficiency (SE), constructing logo-speak over what should be, at its heart, the simplest thing of alclass="underline"
Total sleep time (TST)
—————— x 100 = SE199
Total time in bed (TIB)
This SE coefficient is then to be used in maximizing efficiency by setting a “sleep window,” where there is a terminal period between the concrete time one wakes up (not to vary) and the time one goes to bed (to be shifted based on level of sleepiness at bedtime, which is also given mathematical terrain, a seven-point scale known as the Stanford Sleepiness Scale, where “1 = feeling alert; wide awake” and “7 = sleep onset soon; lost struggle to stay awake.” The very fact that this continuum ends in expectation — the perceived idea of “Here I go, I really am about to go under now” being, often, only one of many mirage doors in a long night’s hallway. In the meantime, further comfort can occur through consecrating and reinforcing the sleep environment as a place of rest (including removing outside light, as the presence of even tiny LCD glow such as from clocks and VCR faces have been shown to dramatically influence quality of sleep), as well as carefully monitoring the substances brought into the body, particularly stimulants, and volumes of liquid large enough to make you need to pee.
What we’re supposed to do, then, is spread all of this worry throughout the day, focusing on attending to these moments actively and in consideration of the night, so that by the time we hit the pillow we’re not only physically rolled upon, but we’ve spent enough brain light on the contraindicators that we might, in our backminds, actually be settled over the idea of interruption, distraction, fright. Do something relaxing and enjoyable before bedtime appears in the same list as the worry scheduling, seeming both a fair suggestion and one worthy of an interminable angst—Like what? How should I relax? Look up sports scores? Eat a scone? This TV has nine hundred channels. Even my e-mail is making sales. Some nights I enjoy music, but tonight the headphones seem to be eating hard into my head. I can’t sit still. My arms feel like someone else’s. I keep thinking there is someone at the door, and the phone keeps ringing, and, and, and… Beyond the mental, masturbation might fill the purpose, teasing the body into a definitive release, and many nights surely that unlocking can kill a body’s stress, but it doesn’t always serve to kill the mind — in fact, the mind sometimes I’ve found in those post-spaces can come even more awakened, spun with the fantasy of flesh architecture or want for want — or on the opposite dimension, a more complete sense of desperation, a silence interrupted thereafter by having peeled away the basic need and awakened again obsessive thinking into now what. Any act that might work one night might not the next night, or might not come again, therefore creating only more frustration or compulsion or distinct confinement to be used to rail against itself. Often the clog just wants more clog.
Mention this ever-spooling solution list to most anybody and more than half have some little trick to pass along, something that might have worked for them or their grandmother among some long night. And often, too, these things, in some desperation, these things appear rising in the wash as wishes or mirage. Regardless of what doubt the long patterns have inscribed, any new thing might still be a potential key. Inevitably, and almost by default, they fall into place on the long list of Things I’ve Tried That Haven’t Worked. Part of the problem herein seems to have to do with resignation — a skepticism for the cure probably leading only that much more headstrong to an awakeness. At some point, even in your want and wish for x-ing out, you almost can’t help but strand yourself therein inside it and thus be cultishly committed to the idea that nothing short of hard-core overriding will make the sleeplessness desist. And so in some ways it becomes self-perpetuating, both consciously and unconsciously, as if it were a state in wanting, a terror badge. Still, no matter how deep this resignation may take hold of the unsleeper’s will, there’s likely no point at which, given a quick reliable out, you’d throw yourself into it whole on.