Sleep, Interrupted

I wake in the small hours, unsure of why, until I strain my ears against the night and hear the faint jingle of keys. A guard's doing his routine wing walkthrough. I'm frequently woken up this way. The cause isn't always noise, though. Sometimes a steel door will slam after I wake up, and I'll realize belatedly that the person who closed it must've aimed a flashlight through the cell window and pierced the fragile membrane of my sleep. In either case, when the interrupter exits the wing, I'm often left to lie here, at the mercy of idle thoughts.

When am I going to be able do laundry tomorrow, considering my schedule? I need to ask how this weekend's Spotlight episode is coming. Shit, and there are still three guest spots to fill for this season of Real Talk. I've got to hurry up and record those episodes! And what are we going to do with the sports slot on Channel X after next week? Mental note: load Twon's notes for the next Playlist episode onto the tablet before our taping. That flyer still needs to be made for the housing units, too. And so on, leaping from thought to thought.

It only makes sense that anxieties about looming deadlines would lay siege to my nights. They certainly preoccupy my daylight hours. Considering that I practice regular meditation, I probably struggle too much with this.

Lying flat on this dense mattress, I turn my focus to the breath. The heaviness of my chest suggests that it's filled with lead. The tension in my neck battles this lumpy pillow. A massage would be nice, I think, then let go of the idea, recognizing its unhelpfulness. Be here, now, I remind myself, and come back to the breath.

It's been a long day. I'm so tired. Sleep should come quickly, but the mattress is hot and my mind is on the move—the perfect recipe for unrest.

I'm no stranger to this. Insomnia plagued me as a teenager. Tossing on my bed for hours on end, I'd be exhausted but kept awake by a mind racing to nowhere. Doctors prescribed medication for sleep, but not even 300 milligrams of trazodone did the trick. The drugs only succeeded in making me dizzy. I'd just lie there, my head swimming, desperate for rest that wouldn't come.

Only when I started taking more control of my life did that anxiousness go away. I started asserting myself, exercising more independence, and opening my mind to the possibility of a rosier future. From major depression, I emerged into something like contentment.

Now is different. I have tools that are tremendously effective under normal conditions. My confinement is entirely to blame for these 2 o'clock wakeups. There's no way for me to prevent from being stirred out of sleep. All I can do is work to get back to that state when it happens. No prevention, only repair.

This fact, too, becomes a conscious thought that harasses me, another ten or fifteen minutes lost to unproductive thought. The sun will be up in a few hours. There's no winning here; I can only practice being a gracious loser.

1.

I rise before my alarm goes off. Moving like a man oblivious to time, I unfold gray clothes and dress myself. Outside of the cell window, dark grass claws its way free of the soil, newly fed by summer rains. I piss. I pour a cup of water. The pungence of instant coffee soon fills the space. I sit in darkness, thinking assailable thoughts.

2. A jingle of some guard's heavy brass keys wakes me with a start. The clock at the end of my bunk reads 3:18 AM – still more than two hours before I usually wake up. I lie prone, eyes closed, listening to the whoosh of air from the ducts. Several cells down the row, a toilet flushes. From far away, sleep taunts me with a call of "Catch me if you can!" 3. In the grand scheme of things, this day won't matter. These breaths I'm taking now are nothing, from the unfathomable perspective of the universe's infinite void. Why bother at all with this alarm, this pathetic little device created to instill in the humans who use it a vain sense of purpose as we stumble about our minuscule lives? Why get out of bed? Why dress and shave and all the rest if this, in the cosmic sense, will all be over soon anyway? My stripped-clean bones' ultimate disintegration, these concrete walls' crumbling to dust, and the heat death of the universe itself are all inevitabilities – so why expend the energy to get up? Yet somehow, I muster enough fortitude to open one eye.... 4. There was a song. Now I don't remember how it went. We were singing it together, the cast of The Simpsons and myself. I don't mean the voice actors who perform as characters for the show, but the characters themselves. We were in a Matt Groening version of Denny's, performing terrible, croony songs for the elderly midday diners. I wake up wondering whether it's stranger that my mind could envision me singing alongside cartoon characters or that I might dream about a TV series I haven't watched in more than twenty-four years. 5. Morning. The bed is the perfect temperature – not so warm that I risk sweating, not so cool that I'll bother dragging my blanket up from the foot. I also, somehow, have found a comfortable position. The sheets are clean and still fluffy from yesterday's washing. I could stay right here, just like this, until noon – except there's work to be done. 6.

I bolt upright and slap my alarm clock. I lie back down and stretch my arms, my neck, my legs, my spine. A thought crosses my mind: Exactly when did I become someone who doesn't care to sleep in?. Climbing down from the bunk, I slip. In the awkward process of righting myself, I twist my wrist to a point just this side of painful. For a moment, the temptation is to pre-emptively resign myself to a cavalcade of minor failures today. A moment later, I reconsider, regroup, and find my center. I embark.

Two Noisy Neighbors Plus Three Phantom Flushes Equal Zero Sleep

Any rest that a person gets in prison is going to be hard-won. This goes as much for fulfilling sleep as for mental rest. I do okay with the latter, with relaxation and meditation, but getting a decent night's rest seems to have become next to impossible.

Jeff and I got a new neighbor on Monday — a skinny kid of about twenty, with short, short dreadlocks and a friendly smile. His cellmate, however, is our least favorite person in the wing, advertising his selfish attitude in almost everything he does, from dragging his feet at lockdown times, to cutting in front of people in line for meals, to frequently shouting back and forth with our neighbors across the walk, to camping on the phone without a care for who's waiting. His consistently shitty behavior makes us wonder how he ever made it to the honor dorm. Some guys just get lucky.

After about two days of the new kid's acclimation, Jeff and I started hearing shuffles, thumps, laughter, and shrieks through the wall. Great, we thought, our neighbors are roughhousers. Throughout the day, their spirited conversations carry easily from their cell to ours. They stay up late into the night, too. I woke to their excited hooting on three separate occasions during the past eighteen hours alone. The last time, I rolled over on my bunk, seized the handle of my metal footlocker, and, as hard as I could, slammed it three times into the wall. Finally, the children quieted down. The damage was done, though; I lay awake for more than an hour afterward, my body piqued with adrenaline, cortisol, and whatever other stress-related chemicals my system churns out when I'm incensed.

Sometime after 1:30 AM, perhaps, sleep's sweet embrace once again enfolded me. I had a dream about my favorite park, about walking through its rose garden and feeling blissfully at ease, free and completely comfortable. All around me, birds came to land in numbers unheard of — sparrows and pigeons, as well as blue jays, grackles, and cardinals by the score.

What might it mean? I asked my dream self. I extended a hand to pet one of the birds' beaks that seemed to be waiting for my touch. It closed its tiny eyes, and other birds came nearer. A feeling of acceptance and trust by these often-timid creatures overwhelmed me.

Then a gurgling rose from nearby, rapidly growing louder and louder, until it became a muted roar. I awoke and still heard the sound: our toilet flushing. By itself. On the top bunk, Jeff turned on his reading lamp. We both stared at the commode flushing itself. It kept going and going, and for a brief period I wondered if it would stop at all, or if we'd have to try to get the institution's plumbers to our cell before breakfast. After a minute or two it let off a high-pitch squeal, then stopped.

I looked at the clock. 3:18 AM. The toilet fell silent. Then it flushed again, for a normal duration. Then it flushed a third time, and was still.

"Our plumbing is haunted," Jeff said.

I grumbled back, "This whole place is nightmarish."

Neither one of us managed a productive sleep after that. I can only imagine what horrors tonight's going to bring. That's prison for you.