Deep Sleep

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