I Can't Get No Sleep - How IMDb, Sort of, Saved My Life

When I was in my late teens, Faithless released this humongous dance hit that rocked the clubs for almost a year. Of the song’s eight-and-a-half minute duration, the DJ almost always played the last three or four minutes, “The Radio Edit”. I, among many others, took to imagining these last minutes as the actual duration of the dance track.

Had I known that one day I would reach a personal milestone of an entire year of sleeping around forty-five minutes a night, I would have demanded the song to be played in its entirety. In the deep dark hours of the night, there is nothing as horrible as the slow minutes inching by, the “I am going to die, I am ACTUALLY going to die” –thoughts every other half hour that passes, sleepless, the ticking of even the most silent alarm clock on the market loud as a beating drum, the gradual awakening of the surrounding world, knowing that the whirring in my brain just won’t stop, and another day is dawning where I have to get up, go to work, and try to behave like a normal person who doesn’t have this problem. And THAT, as I understand, is the reason for the eight-and-a-half minutes duration. The song represents those hours, and represents them well.

It first started, when Finland was bathed in one of the worst heatwaves of my recollection, in July, two and a half years ago. The weather condition happened to coincide with a new relationship, a hard falling in love, almost too much for someone in her late thirties. First I was too hot to sleep. Then, I was too hot to sleep.

But as summer gave way to fall and the sleeplessness began to transform into a real problem instead of a symptom of intense feeling, it truly started to take a toll. I had no energy to see my friends. I barely stayed alert at work. I became irritable and nervous and started to cry or throw things at the slightest aggravation.

I stopped wearing mascara to work because my eyes hurt so much that even the tiniest smidgen of goo made them tear up – I only wish I could have said I was doing it to show the world the woman behind the mask like the ever gorgeous Alicia Keys is doing, but I wasn’t. I was so tired. I was so tired, the old Ringo line from the movie Help ceased to make me smile. (John: What are you doing on the floor? Ringo: I’m tired.)

As with many psychological problems, my insomnia did not come without company. Introduce clinical depression, delusions, trapped feeling, feelings of total isolation, morbid desire to do anything, anything, to make it stop, to be able to fall asleep again.

The suicidal thoughts came and went, as did the conspiracy theories and paranoia. The only thing that really stuck was the horrible ringing in my ears, which seemed to come from inside my brain. I felt like Woody Allen’s character at the doctor’s in Hannah and Her Sisters, when he asks if it’s healthier to have problems in both ears so that it won’t be a brain tumor. Even after I started to get a few hours each night, it was weeks until the ringing subsided.

In my long sleepless nights, I tried to think of ways to make the night go quicker. I took up knitting, an old hobby of mine. Hated it. Had lost all patience for it. I could not believe there had been a time in my life I had actually made everyone I knew and loved knitwear as Christmas presents. On closer inspection I realized I hadn’t touched my needles since that one time I knit twenty-five pairs of mittens and socks and two hats for my extended family and friends in the fall of 2012 like The Ghost of Christmas Past gone insane. Maybe that knitting craze of 2012 had just pushed me over the edge. I think I still have a half finished hat, the beginning of a scarf, and one gray mitten without a thumb, somewhere in the house.

I contemplated rereading Stephen King’s entire back catalogue, then thought better of it. No one can survive two rounds of the whole package; lord knows there are some real page turners, but then you’ve got the bombs, too. On the IMDb forum on King there was this whole big discussion on it. The thread was about which one of his works, the books, not movies, because on IMDb’s discussion forums one can discuss anything at all, that’s the beauty of it, was the absolute bottom of the barrel, and after two or three pages of yes and no, one contributor actually acknowledged how unanimous people really were on the topic. The same six or seven books were mentioned almost by every user, only the order varied a little. It is a rare moment in the world of heated, raging online debates, that people actually reach a consensus over the main point. It was sweet, really, and even more so, because about a year ago when I was following a similar debate on the Jaws forum, there was no harmony or unity to be found on the following topic: If you had to decide, how would you rather go, by eaten by a shark in the ocean, of by eaten by a crocodile in the river. The amount of dedication the participants gave the topic, defending their views, was really incredible. People got angry, names were called, someone left, slamming the virtual door behind them. More recently, though, I realized the joke really was on me, when I checked the ten and more pages of threads on the Gilmore Girls revival site, die-hard fans outraged, mesmerized, or everything in between, over the new content.

A friend told me, having battled his own sleeplessness due to having the kids (I of course didn’t have – the kids – and therefore it often seemed that if I mentioned my problem to others, they would never respond with any real sympathy. It was always more “But you look fine”, as if insomnia by default was somehow less than sleeplessness caused by one’s kids learning their sleeping patterns.) that, having discussed the issue with a childless, artsy mutual friend of ours, not unlike myself, she had uttered a thought that, after my friend forwarded it to me, has since become one of the deepest and most eloquently put musings on the issue I have ever heard, and here it is:

Would it be possible, that instead of worrying and raging over the lost hours every night, one might learn to have gratitude for even the shortest intervals of being under? Never mind if it’s one minute or ten minutes. It is still money in the bank.

Basically it’s the same advice that Joey gives Chandler about the latter’s relationship with Janice on Friends: “If you’re afraid of bugs - get a bug!”, only delivered in a nicer package.

I have been on four different kinds of sleeping pills or tranquilizers. I’ve been to three different therapists. I bought two different types of sleep-inducing tea. I’ve tried exercising, not eating after six, reducing the temperature in the bedroom, nineteenth century novels, nonsense poetry. I’ve prayed, raged, pleaded, bargained, tried to negotiate. After what seemed like a damn eternity, I have finally begun resembling a living person again. Little by little the sleep returned, with a little help from my friends mentioned above.

I still eat sleeping pills. I tried quitting earlier this fall, against my doctor’s advice, because I was just sick of eating them and the heartburn and the bloated feeling (which has nothing whatsoever to do with the late night pasta fests). After a sleepless month I finally caved. Also, a surprise support was given by my gynecologist, to whom I was merely musing on all my troubles while lying there, and she told me: “If it turns out you just can’t sleep without them, so what?” Her simple response was like a splash of fresh water to my face, so I have since tried not to worry too much about it.

For those who are outraged and consider me a total jerk for sneering at the IMDb discussion forums from the backseat and not participating where participation is due: I am sorry, I know it is wrong, but believe me when I tell you (Quick, what’s the next line? Answer to be found below!), my relationship would not survive my creating an account to participate on IMDb. I have a tendency to go all out when I get excited about something, and my man can barely stand my GG marathons as it is. So to wrap it up from my end, here are my rock-bottom five from the Stephen King barrel:

Song of Susannah – in general I felt The Dark Tower series peaked in Wizard and Glass and Wolves of The Calla, and from there on it was downhill, but this one especially. Even the much criticized ending wasn’t that horrible to me. Song of Susannah was. It was boring.

Cell. Yes, also on my list. King is a genius at short story or novella form with the no resolve ending, but this one – why oh why? And one thing has always bothered me: the fact that there are odious zombies all around and this small group is trying to stay alive and flee, and King has the protagonist take time to worry about how his kid’s letter writing technique is looking to his friends. That would never happen. I’m just saying.

Needful Things. I have reread lots of King’s books over the years, but somehow I always seem to miss this. I guess it has to be the boredom factor again. Or maybe the too close a resemblance to Salem’s Lot, one of my favorites.

The Dark Half. Every time I see sparrows swarming, I think of this book and how not afraid I was when I read it the one time I did. The kid brother, Secret Window, Secret Garden, is one of my all-time favorites.

Rose Madder. This, along with Insomnia, is on almost all the discussion group’s participants’ lists. I sort of enjoyed the latter, and it got better on the second read. But Rose Madder. It is all over the book that the construction of the story differed hugely from every single other one of King’s stories. It just doesn’t feel at all like a Stephen King novel.

Okay I said five, but I have a sixth that cannot be ignored. Dreamcatcher. It was so awful I just felt like slamming the book to the wall. Self-pitying and obese and surplus and not real mayonnaise.

Like many others, I also haven’t read Under The Dome or Doctor Sleep, yet, because of the bad reputation. They are staring at me right at this moment from the Stephen King section of my bookshelves. For now, I let them. Also, as a curiosity, I never did read Gerald’s Game, a book many users had on their Worst of King –list. When I was a young girl and it was new, the Finnish edition had a nude woman on the cover and I was too embarrassed to check it out from the library. Then time went on, and I never got back to it. With its high standing on this questionable list, I probably never will.

As for the question about the shark versus the crocodile, I choose the crocodile. Anything but the shark. Anything.

Dedicated to the IMDb discussion forum users. Always a brighter day with you guys, never change. I think our Stars Hollow homies are in bed by now.

(The next line is: I’ll never do you no harm.)