Sleep

“You are suffering from what we call an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ effect,” Dr. Sankar informed me as I climbed out of a rabbit hole. I was late for a very important date to discuss my sleep (or lack thereof). “When you fall asleep,” he continued, “your thoughts race, and you think: What should I be doing? What do I need to do? Where am I? Where am I going?” I had fallen head-first into another wonderland: Ananda in the Himalayas. Located in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India, Ananda – which translates to “happiness” in Sanskrit – is a world-renowned holistic retreat that towers above the bustling city of Rishikesh and the sacred Ganges River.

It's 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon.

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from insomnia. Something that should be easy – newborn babies can just about manage it, after all – has become the hardest thing in my life. I’ve lost jobs because of it, and relationships: you feel like you are cut off from society. That’s one of the most annoying parts – most people’s response to the word ‘insomnia’ is to feel an obligation to say: ‘Really? I always fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow!

For most of my life, I was a night owl. Up-and-at-‘em types would tease me for my sleeping-in habits. I’d go on the defensive by saying, yeah, you get up at the crack of dawn, but you’re also in bed by dusk like a nerd, whereas I burn the midnight oil like some mad genius tinkering away with the romantic moon and my fellow nocturnal beasts. I preferred, until relatively recently, to work late rather than get up early to complete tasks. In college, I avoided 8 a.m. classes like Joe Biden avoids news conferences. But deep down, I always longed to be one of those people who was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning, accomplishing half their to-do list before I had hit the snooze button for the third time. For years, I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

'The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.' So said Freud in 1899 as the world was about to tip over into the dream obsessed twentieth century and its many decades of tortured introspection. For years, Freud has been roundly discredited. But it seems that, even if Freud remains unfashionable, his belief in the meaning of dreams is making a return, namely in the form of dream retreats and therapies marketed at our pandemic-addled subconscious. Whilst it was once formerly the duty of the long-suffering spouse to listen to last night’s dream – naked in an exam, driving down the M40 backwards and on fire, giving birth to the wrong child etc.