The Science of Sleep

Last night, I had another dream about my home. I have those most every night now, ever since the selling of the place finally took place in December. Sometimes the dreams develop into nightmares and I wake up in the dead of night in cold sweat. Other times, like last night, they are more like what I have always dreamed about. Last night, once more, the honey-combed panel ceiling started bulging dangerously, especially in the living room, and some panels fell on the floor. This time, what was exposed above was not a giant insect hive, but instead an enormous attic space, almost as large as the house itself, filled with old furniture and boxes full of toys and picture frames and notebooks, apparently my old journals, which in real life I have safely filed inside a special cabinet in my own apartment; old Sarah Kay posters on the walls, a huge easy chair underneath a small window, perfect for curling up with a book: a little girl’s fantasy.

I was mesmerized. I was amazed and ecstatic, and immediately asked mother to give me a boost to get up there. Happy and curious, I started opening the boxes and finding out what treasures lay inside.

It was a long, wonderful dream, dreamed right before I awoke, it seemed, for when I dragged myself in the bathroom in the morning, I was able to remember everything about it, and I still do. Sometimes dreams evaporate the second one wakes up. Others, the dream lingers for hours, days, years, even, like the one where the giant science fiction monster I was able to see only partially, much like years later in the movie Cloverfield in fact, was after me, and I had to hide inside that same old house, and it was summer, and sunshine was pouring in from every window and I was sure that the monster would see me easily and snatch me away the way King Kong snatched people through the window of the apartment building.

What is sleep? What constitutes a coherent, sane mind? Is the age-old cliché true, that all artists must suffer from a tiny bit of insanity, in order to be able to deal with their tempestuous, artistic selves, forever oscillating between madness and sanity, poking the nerve endings, shimmering just outside perception like a tic in the eye? I used to think it was more or less bullshit, a gimmick, and that an artist is more like a craftsman than some McMurphy in a straightjacket, screaming and hollering while he is being gurneyed into lobotomy. Now, not so much.

In the movie, from whence I borrowed the title for my story, the lead character, played by Gael García Bernal, has a vivid and extraordinary dream life, to the extent that his reality and dream world intersect and interconnect and flow into one another in a way only Michel Gondry can illustrate; the further we see his life unravel before us, and the further his relationship develops with a like-minded, kind of a recluse the way he is, highly imaginative the way he is, girl living nextdoor to him, the more his dreams represent and interpret in surprising and sometimes conflicting ways his inner desires and how he would like things to turn out.

In his dreams, he kicks his rude and cold boss around, makes violent love to his hot co-worker, acts out in most wonderful ways, creates a whole new world, and, most of all, isn’t afraid to tell his chosen person that he wants to be with her, that he sees in her a kindred spirit, that he, in fact, loves her. When they meet up in real life, all kinds of awkward things, wrong things, are said, by the man more than the bewildered girl, and it takes the entire duration of the film to finally make them both see that their connection has nothing to do with words, but with a deeper sense of an alternate, shared, reality, a similarity in seeing magic where others would find only used candy wrappers, a roll of cellophane, or discarded egg cartons. Words can be clumsy and wrong, but the feeling, the ease, the seamlessness, in being with the dreamer man, is the almost impossible to find true love.

I saw the movie for the first time when I was still intact. I had always had a wild dream life, and I guess there was a way of seeing things differently from others inherent in me, but I was still living the life unbeknownst to the horrors of insomnia, and all else that was kicked into being as result of this and the extreme stress I was under at the time when I lost the sleep. In other words, the sickness hadn’t blown into full bloom yet, I was still a citizen of the sane world, much more than I am today, although an argument could be made to maintain that, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, there is something wonderful to be said about and produced from the set of mind of the mad.

I was a child who enjoyed solitude. My mother tells me I would tell my parents I was to be found in my room, and play there, alone, for hours, not building TV studios out of empty toilet paper shells, but writing, organizing my collection of pretty pictures, making little dioramas out of knick-knacks and little kid’s plastic jewelry in my bookshelf. I have delved into literature tackling my problems, and if I am totally honest, the seeds have been there, not exactly dormant, but visible for the astute, even before I stopped sleeping and set off my own insanity. In medical books they say the problems typically start in early adolescence, and may sometimes vaporize in middle age, when a person usually cools off a bit, from his or her anxieties and youthful anger and extremities.

This wasn’t the case for me. For me, it was a violent and total fall, brought on by an abrupt change, a total shift in my whole being I was in no way prepared for, and found no way to handle. So, my mind went into lockdown. It just – wouldn’t budge.

Never one to take things as they came, there had been long intervals of solitary years in between relationships, or perhaps it would be safer to say it was the other way around. Occasionally, someone would come along who seemed to endure my idiosyncrasies and totalitarian tendencies to need to control every single aspect of my life, and the relationship, with an iron hand. The love affair would go on for a while. Then, one day, out of nowhere, I would find myself musing secretly to myself, how, when I was living alone again, I would perhaps get a new sofa, or never again use those drapes, or never tolerate the other person interrupting me like that ever again.

I would say nothing, of course. But the idea had been planted. The idea of just in how many different ways being alone would be so much better than this crap I was having to put up with someone who was only barely tolerable in my everyday life. I needed space, I needed solitude to think. I wanted to go about my private games of writing and organizing my collections of pretty pictures, privately. Of course, such harsh thinking always led to looking back, regretting a lot of things said, thinking perhaps I had made the wrong call. This would go on for a while, sometimes years, while I, quite happily, resumed my solitary ways, telling the world I would be found in my room, and playing there by myself.

I never thought that there was anything wrong with the total contradiction of my ways and how I talked about missing my relationships. For a little while after an affair had ended, the loneliness indeed would kill me. But then I would once more get the hang of it, and relish it. Of course I missed being loved and I missed those whom I had loved, or still loved. But I loved being able to have a total say into matters of my own. I never found any way of coming to a compromise between these two opposite desires. No one could understand me. Pretending to do things the way everybody else did became exhausting after a while. My girlfriends came closest in getting what it was about, but as time went on, I gave up on thinking anyone could ever see why I was the way I was.

In the medical books it is noted that it is typical for the person suffering from these problems to have his or her life peppered with short-lived, very intense love affairs and friendships, and the feeling for the object of affection will sky-dive and alternate between idolization and extreme devaluation. In another film of Gondry’s, the borderline character, Clementine, decides impulsively to erase all evidence of her lover from her mind with some cutting-edge technology that tampers only with the human brain, but alas, not the heart. The idea of the film is that we may want to get rid of the old ball in chain and start over, but in matters of the heart, things are never quite that simple or easy. Not only does Clementine begin to fall in love with the same man all over, but there is another woman in the story, who, as it turns out in one of the most heart-wrenching moments of the film, has had the procedure done multiple times, always ridding her memories of love for the same person. We are bound to run in circles, to make the same choices again and again, memory or no of the previous heartache. The movie wisely suggests that perhaps, instead of eternal recurrence, we might benefit from standing still for a second, and let the love recognize us, let it come, pain and everything.

In yet another example, Be Kind Rewind, the borderline character is studied in contrast to his more patient and forgiving counterpart, and the love recognized there is the love of friendship and respect, more than romantic love. Still, the same rules apply to Jack Black’s Jerry as to Gael García Bernal’s Stèphane as to Kate Winslet’s Clementine. They are all deeply troubled people, who torment and run amok and create chaos in the lives of those who get close to them and are crazy enough to love them, but they are also unforgettable, passionate, fierce people, who are kind and loving at heart, but don’t always know how to communicate that kindness and love to others.

I lost the sleep, and as consequence from the stress on the brain, and the stress from other outside sources, my sickness stepped out, from the shadows and veils I had cleverly hid it beneath before the mind lost her defenses and cracked. Having gone through another one of those I want to be left alone – cycles since then, and realizing there is really someone next to me, still, crazy enough to deal with all my shit, even now that it has a name and everything, although over-simplifying is always nothing but – over-simplifying, who will not let go, even when I am at my most irrational and ludicrous, I am beginning to doubt my old desires to be left alone. My torturer may not exactly be my remedy, the way Beyoncé meant, but I am beginning to see new truths in both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well as The Science of Sleep.

Not giving up on love is more powerful than being powerful alone. There is a healing power there, in love, if only we let it in. I never did before, not really. I kept everyone at arm’s length, hiding my weirdness until I could no longer hide it, then ending it all, and feeling horrible afterwards. Letting someone in is the scariest thing in the world, especially if one is not what you’d call a normal person. But there is really no other way around it, if we want to be understood and embraced as who we are, and this is, of course, what every person wants. I never got it before. I figured it was my lot, to go it alone. Then the sleeplessness and other nuisances happened, because I fell in love, hard. I fell the way I had never fallen before, and broke myself a little while at it. I could blame the object of my affection for all my troubles. But maybe, just maybe, there is a larger lesson to be learnt here from all the hubbub, and perhaps not triumphing, but learning to cope with it.

There is an anecdote about Oscar Wilde I would like to repeat here. He was walking on the street, and one of his despisers saw him from the other side. “There goes that bloody fool Oscar Wilde!” the heckler said. Unfazed, Mr. Wilde mused: “It is amazing how fast one becomes well-known in London!” This is the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome inside us, the troubled. It isn’t that we are unaware of our troublesome and challenging nature. There is, at times, a deep resentment towards the abnormal, the artist, the mental patient, inside us. But there is also the Oscar Wilde part, who appreciates ourselves the way we are and sees not only the bad, but the power and uniqueness inside.

For these same reasons, I believe, Michel Gondry makes his films about strange people living inside their heads and in strange lands within and reverberating through the prosaic, real world of money and status and the death of romance. The viewpoint of the outsider, an eye for the extraordinary, the understanding of the strange and unpredictable, it is all there.

I used to consider Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Gondry’s masterpiece, but now, having gone through the ringer of losing myself and of a slow recovery, and rediscovery of the sound mind and the soul, I am leaning towards The Science of Sleep. Having lost it for a while, I can appreciate even the nightmares better than ever before. To dream, any dream, is a hundred times better than lying awake in the dead of night and wondering when death will come. An artist is a craftsman. But after I stepped back from the ledge, and found I had lost the juvenile fears of making a fool of myself, the worrying what others might think of my strangeness, and the adolescent and quite unnecessary modesty and insecurity about my writing, I see that the secret ingredient here truly was a slim dose of insanity, to drive the demon out. What made the difference for me was to experience the fragmentation of the coherent self firsthand. Just to have those things fall out of me in the process of reconstructing who I was after the fall, makes me one of those tiresome know-it-alls, who will tell you, that everything in this life does happen for a reason, even when it takes a while to see what the reason is.

Losing control, completely, was the most important, all-changing, precious thing, in all its horror and monstrosity, to ever happen to me. Like Stèphane, who unceremoniously meets his counterpart while thinking his life is going down the toilet, and how it takes him a while to recognize both that his life is actually pretty wonderful, and the fact that he has met the person he is supposed to be with, that he fits in with her, that she doesn’t look at him as if he had bats in the attic, but instead wonderful flowers and trees, and an easy chair under a small window for reading. Madness, like love, or lack-there-of, in many ways, is in the eye of the beholder.

Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004, The Science of Sleep 2006, Be Kind Rewind 2008

Oscar Wilde anecdote from Stranger Than Fiction: A Book of Literary Lists, by Aubrey Dillon Malone, 1999