In my teens up to my early
30s, I got by on very little sleep. At most 6 hours a day, usually 4-5. I felt
most awake in the early morning. I woke up mentally around midnight and hit my
most lucid moments around 2 am. According to my grandfather, my father and
various uncles, this is the time when ghosts come out. Scary, long-dead,
amorphous (usually) women with long hair and no feet who waited for you in outhouses
and country schoolrooms. Before Park Chunghee modernized the country through
military “democracy.” Before the 1988 Olympics when I got my first bra and perm
and playing cards buckled in the humid summer air. Before segyehwa. Before KPop.
When you write or party or
watch a movie or have sex or do anything after midnight, time stops or slows down,
and everything feels like a deeply significant event. Images, actions and moods
take on an enhanced, dreamlike quality. For me it used to be the best time to
write. Whether it was a poem, an academic paper or just me communing with
myself and my future selves in the many journals I have kept since I was 8.
These days, I find myself
craving sleep. Just like I crave food. Constantly. It’s as if living in my mind
all these years has finally caught up with me at age 40. And all I want is to
live in my body, experiencing as much pleasure as I can in it and through it.
This means often turning off my brain. Not analyzing. Not thinking. Not
judging. This is difficult for me. Believe me.
Sleep is good for this,
because it allows for dreams. I read recently that Thomas Edison used to sleep
only 3 hours a day, much like Leonardo Da Vinci, both famous eccentric
inventors. Edison would tie metal balls to his wrists and sleep sitting down
(while working, one presumes). As soon as he dozed off too much, the sound of
the metal balls hitting the ground would wake him up and he would immediately
write down any genius ideas he had cooked up in his sleep before he forgot
them.
Impressive.
Insane.
I’ve been trying to write
down my dreams. It’s hard. I think sometimes forgetting dreams is not bad. Why
do we try so hard to remember? To document memories through writing or photos
or videos? As if, by reminiscing over who we were in the past – through
selective memory – we can better understand who we are and what we have become,
or shouldn’t become? But sometimes the memories are burdens, just like
histories. Writing can become a burden. Language is a burden.
Deep sleep – with no lucid
dreaming, no neoliberal attempts to mine productive commodities from subconscious
play – this is what I crave these days, and have decided to indulge in, with
wild abandon. It is the most wonderful luxury.
To sleep in.
To not do anything.
To slow down.
To NOT GIVE A SHIT.
To become Luscious Vegetable.
Of course I can only do this
when I’m on holiday or depressed. I’m an academic after all. I make my living
by being awake, alert. This – “alert” – is the adjective that a PhD supervisor once
used to describe me in a glowing reference letter. The sentence went something
like, “She is one of the most alert students
I have ever had the pleasure of supervising.” I think he probably meant
“neurotic” and “paranoid” as well. These are the companions of alert. One becomes awake in this hyper
conscious way -- of one’s environment and others -- through training.
When I was a kid, I had to
develop really good nunchi. Because
my mother who I love and who loves me but who used to be crazy, had a way of
communicating her desire and anger in the most inconsistent ways. I had to
learn to read her body language so I wouldn't make her mad, or disappoint her,
or turn into my father whom she hated. With (some) good reason. My dad – now he
really liked to sleep. He slept instead of writing the academic papers and
books that would have gotten him tenure. He slept, I think, because he was
afraid of the failure that he had become and kept becoming. He slept to escape
a life he probably never wanted.
My brother, who is younger
than I am, and much more successful (he owns his own company and can make
friends with anyone) also liked to
sleep. Once, when he was in elementary school, the teacher asked the students
in class to to go to the blackboard and write what they most liked to do. Other
kids wrote things like, “I like birthday parties … ice cream … Transformers.”
My brother wrote, “I like to sleep.” The teacher thought he was a very peculiar
child.
Almost everyone I’ve dated –
except one strange exception who slept 12+ hours a day – has slept few and
irregular hours. In my last serious relationship, I managed to convert my lover
into someone who went from sleeping 3 hours a day to a regular 7-8 routine. He
was very grateful. He also stopped being an alcoholic for 3 months because, he
said, he loved me. But old and bad habits die hard. The lovely fairy tale we
lived for a little while is over (the messy dramas documented neatly in my
journal for future analysis). No doubt, he is back to the drink and 3 hours of
sleep.
I write this in Kuala Lumpur
at my friend’s quiet flat in the suburbs. The sky is overcast. I arrived 2 days
ago from a conference in Hong Kong. I feel very glam and grateful to the
universe. This morning I got up at 6 am then went back to sleep and woke up at
11 am. I am looking forward to delicious Malaysian food tonight. In a few days,
I’ll be back in the air (my favorite place, nowhere), watching another bad
movie while everyone else sleeps. Then to Korea, the place that didn’t feel
like home for a long time. Oddly, it’s beginning to since I left my adopted home
of America to live in a third space called Australia. A place where I have no
history and no commitments. An in-between, interim place where I can indulge in
deep and dreamless sleep every night.
Part of 잠물결"Restless" - an art exhibit by Taey Iohe, Seoul, December 2013
