For three months now, i have been going to sleep every night at 7 pm and getting up at 7 am, spending twelve hours out of every twenty-four lying in bed, in the dark. You can read about how this came about here and here. Along the way i was joined in this adventure by P. and all four children. A month ago, we took it one step further and decided to make do without electric light after dusk. Without electric bulbs and screens of any kind, our evenings have become gentle candle-lit affairs, of a rather brief kind. Turns out candle-light makes people sleepy...
This adventure, born of necessity (as all real adventures are...), has been a complete life-changer. So much so that i hardly know where to start in sharing with you what this lifestyle tweak has meant for me.
So while i'm collecting my thoughts, indulge me for a moment and let me take you on a tiny excursion through time, back-tracking a little (or way way back), to when the world was young, and we were...
... fishes, crawlies, tree-climbers, four-paw wonders, monkeys, our ancestors... Long before and all the way through the history of our planet, we have all had a profound, indestructible and inalienable relationship with the night.
How could it be otherwise? Night held our lives lovingly cupped in her hands, like parentheses around our beginning and end (Who was not born in and of Night? Who did not return to her in the end?).
And as if that were not enough, Night fell. Every night.
And every night again, she carried us away. Every night she restored, repaired, refashioned us, at her will. There was nothing we could do about it. Nothing but give ourselves over to the mystery, surrender to the waves, and trust that our little boat would make it to see the rising sun. So we huddled together, for warmth, for comfort, we huddled together in the night because the dark can be frightening.
We did not understand the night (who does?), but we knew her. We knew she was dark, rich, moist, mysterious, unknowable. We knew her as our alpha, and our omega, our past and our future, and the shaper of our now. As the dark soil we grew out of and were replenished by. She could steal us away, and miraculously return us to ourselves, seemingly unchanged, but ultimately undone and redone.
We understood her as the great shape-shifting power that ruled over our lives.
For the longest, longest time, our relationship with the Night was like our relationship to gravity. Utterly unavoidable. Utterly dependable. Utterly necessary.
...
But then things went a bit awry... (they often do, have you noticed?) (in fact, you might argue that human history is one long series of things gone awry, for better or for worse...)
Books on the history of sleep disagree (as books do) on exactly when, how and why this happened, but they could have all saved themselves a lot of bother, and just asked me. it happens i know.
It was in 1791. With Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
This fantastic tale recounts how Prince Tamino and bird-catcher Papageno are sent on a mission to save Princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the clutches of the evil Sorcerer Sarastro, only to find out.... that Sarastro is in fact Pamina's father (the original Star Wars plot...), who only abducted her in the first place to save her from the clutches of her evil and murderous mother, the Night. At which point, all male protagonists join forces, the Night is destroyed and the beautiful Princess saved to be married to Prince Tamino and live forever in the light of day in her Father's Kingdom.
It was not called the age of Enlightenment for nothing. European cities acquired street lighting, rich people began to throw balls and parties in the dark (imagine!), and our rational logical anthropocentric world view began to actively encroach on and slowly conquer the dark.
In the Magic Flute, Sarastro stands for the male principle, the day, the light, the sun, ratio, logical thinking and life itself, versus the Queen of the Night, who represents the female principle, the moon, murkiness, death, intuition, superstition and magic.
(and of course, if we are to believe Amadeus, Mozart wrote most of his stuff late at night... while fleeing the dark, running for his life from the terrible nightmares that haunted him......)
We all know how the rest of this story goes. Bit by bit, we collectively reduced the night to its bare minimum, and then took a bit off that too... (figures on the current sleep crisis in the western world suggest that very few people you or i know spend the bare minimum of 7-8 hours in the dark every night).
The night became associated with laziness, wasted time, lack of productivity, an unnecessary death-like disconnection, an anachronism, the last problem to be solved before we can finally take off and soar free (to Mars?).
I remember how it happened for me as a child. When i was little, the night was a massive experience, but as I grew, it slowly shrank back, its wings clipped at both ends. I remember I couldn't wait to be allowed to join the grown-ups in the coveted sanctum of the evening. I knew that was where all the fun and important stuff was happening. So i leaned forward, towards the time when i would be allowed to stay up, until 7, 8, 9, 10, midnight...
On the other end, too, the night was forced to give way: by age 7 my alarm-clock had become chiselled into my life and body, ensuring that i did not lie in bed a minute longer than the system allowed.
In this way, chip by chip, i lost most of it...
...until all that was left was a solid block of uninterrupted deep sleep. Because when you chip enough away from the night, in the end all you are left with is the physiological imperative. The dog-body that must, that will claim its due, whether you like it or not.
Somewhere along the way, i too came to the conclusion that the night was a bit of a sad waste of time. necessary, maybe, but no fun. No significance, no meaning, no treasure.
Fun and treasure and meaning were elsewhere: in the day, and as i grew into an adult and later a mother, increasingly concentrated in the last bit of it: the holy evening.
(...with motherhood, the night itself had been forced into even tighter quarters, and had turned into a hellish struggle for survival as my exhausted body battled with my confused mind for its most basic needs...)
As a mother of babies and young children, my entire life became focused on the evening, my holy of holies, me-time. Time for social contacts, for rest, for creativity, for growth, for learning, for relationship. I filled my evenings (when i could catch one) with interesting watching and reading, yoga, knitting, sewing, writing, painting, sculpting, meetings with friends, games, sex, conversation, meditation, prayer and work.
All activities ultimately intended to help me find that which i longed for and found increasingly and incredibly elusive:
Inner peace, well-being, emotional resilience, joy, equanimity, creativity, deep connection with myself, others and god, purpose, meaning, and magic.
My efforts and iron self-discipline were rewarded to some extent, but i often (often) (too often) felt that i was somehow stuck playing with god's fingers, while missing the moon altogether.
Little did i know (how could i? it was lost so long ago...) that the moon in that metaphor ain't no metaphor...
...
Here then, in the disorder, is everything i have discovered in the past three months about the Night:
- The night is not for sleeping only. Although absolutely essential, sleep is but the tip of the iceberg of what the night has to offer. Once this primal physical imperative is satisfied, the night can have its magical way with me.
- During the day i may 'do life', but at night, there is no doubt that 'life does me'. Agency and control are cancelled. Night is the ultimate surrender.
- I remember how proud i used to be when i remembered a bit of my dream upon waking. I would hungrily write the broken bits and pieces down in my journal, and chew on them during the day, trying like a drunken archaeologist, to reassemble the bones ('the foot bone's connected to the shin bone, the shin bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone...'). It rarely made sense, but i always felt as if i had stumbled on some jumbled treasure, a rare exotic bird briefly glimpsed through the foliage, its shape indistinguishable, but still, the pride in having 'caught it by the tail...'
Now i know that these sightings were nothing. As i spend three sometimes four hours every night with the exotic bird sitting quietly on my shoulder, whispering long stories into my ear, I understand at last that dreams are not meant to be remembered or interpreted in the light of day. They make no sense there, because their language, their meaning is other, and they can only be grasped processed understood incorporated integrated in the night that has borne them and that offers them to me, on a silver platter, night after faithful night. For nourishment.
- A living relation with the night is essential for a living relation with the day. The night, with its timeless expansion and contraction, fuels the day. The two cannot exist without one another. When i skip the night (as i have done for decades) the day slowly loses its colour, its texture, its yumminess, and becomes grey, dull, painful and meaningless. I have found no better (and no other) antidote to this existential malaise than re-entering into a primal living relationship with the night.
- Meditation, therapy, yoga, tai-chi, and all the other amazing techniques i have learnt along the way, when practised regularly and assiduously for a long period of time, all point to the same state I enter effortlessly every single night once my need for sleep is satisfied. They just take a lot more effort, and a lot more time. (Remember the guru asked by one of his students: 'Teacher, what do you think about meditation?'. The guru answered: 'It can't hurt.')
- The Dalai Lama goes to bed at 7 pm every night. Need i say more?
(actually, i do. Need to say more: he was also quoted saying that 'sleep is the best meditation'. And if there is anyone in the world i trust to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous, it's the Dalai Lama...)
(of course, i now understand that the secret behind his (the Dalai Lama's) ability to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous is that he goes to bed at 7 pm every night)
(this is not as circular as it looks...)
- The night repairs and nourishes my body, awakens my sensuality, restores my social relationships, heals my wounds, injects my entire system with magic and creativity, connects me with god, restores my faith, my hope, and my ability to act and be in the world, regulates my emotions, and greatly enhances my ability to shine my light.
- Also, and relatedly, giving the night back its due has allowed me to cancel two thirds of my to-do list. For one thing, anything to do with solitude, me-time, introspection, reflection, writing, creativity, self-development, etc. can now be safely left to the effortless dark. The day has been returned to its original purpose: to jot down the night's harvest (done in a jiffy), and engage in and with the world. For another thing, the night is teaching me to distinguish between the essential and the superfluous (remember those fairy-tales in which the heroine is given the impossible task to sort a pile of dirt and poppy seeds. she always has to do it at night. and the night always sends a helper), and to make a long story short, a lot of stuff on my to-do list, when seen in the light of night, turns out to be more dirt than poppy.
- Relatedly, again, i have experienced an incredible decompression of time. There is now always enough time for everything, seas and seas of it in fact. A strange experience after decades of feeling constantly rushed and late for something (the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, that's my calmer twin brother...), especially since technically speaking, there is a lot less time in my day now.
- All you need to wake up is go to bed.
- Oh, did i mention bliss?
...
this post really wanted to be entitled: How I Cancelled the Evening, Discovered the Night, and Received the Gifts of the Day. but that would have made the above bit of writing redundant, so i didn't let it have its way.
* for some of the science behind the what and why of night magic, see here and here. these are just my first dippings into the incredible wealth of literature and science on the subject. i'll add more links here as i read more.
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