Insomnia

“If I understand what you’re saying,” Ralph replied, “my dreams are coherent.”

“Good, I also want to know if they’re lucid dreams. Lucid dreaills fulfill two requirements. First, you know you’re dreaming.

Second, you can often influence the course the dream takes-you’re more than just a Passive observer.”

Ralph nodded. “Sure, I have those, too.

In fact, I seem to have a lot of them lately. I was just thinking of one I had last night. In it this stray dog I see on the street from time to time ran off with a Frisbee some friends of mine and I were playing with. I was mad that she broke up the game, and I tried to make her drop the Frisbee just by sending her the thought. Sort of a telepathic command, you know?”

He uttered a small, embarrassed chuckle, but Wyzer only nodded matter-of-factly. “Did it work?”

“Not this time,” Ralph said, “but I think I have made that sort of thing work in other dreams. Only I can’t be sure, because most of the dreams I have seem to fade away almost as soon as I wake up.”

“That’s the case with everyone,” Wyzer said. “The brain treats most dreams as disposable matter, storing them in extreme shortterm memory.”

“You know a lot about this, don’t you?”

“Insomnia interests me very much. I did two research papers on the link between dreams and sleep disorders when I was in college.”

Wyzer glanced at his watch. “It’s my break-time. Would you like to have a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie with me? There’s a place ’just two doors down, and the pie is fantastic.”

“Sounds good, but maybe I’ll settle for a n orange soda. I’ve been trying to cut down on my coffee intake.”

“Understandable but completely useless,” Wyzer said cheerfully.

“Caffeine is not your problem, Ralph.”

“No, I suppose not… but what is?” To this point Ralph had been quite successful at keeping the misery out of his voice, but now it crept back in.

Wyzer clapped him on the shoulder and looked at him kindly. “That,” he said, “is what we’re going to talk about. Come on.”

CHAPTER 5

“Think of it this way,” Wyzer recommenced five minutes later. They Sun Down. were in a New Age-y sort of diner called DawyhBorebaekli,eyed in oldThe place was a little too ferny for Ralph, fashioned diners that gleamed with chrome and smelled of grease, but the pie was good, and while the coffee was not up to Lois Chasse’s standards-Lois made the best cup he had ever tasted-it was hat and strong.

“Which way is that?” Ralph asked. “There are certain things mankind-womankind, too-keel)s striving for. Not the stuff that gets written up in the history and civics books, either, at least for the most part; I’m talking fundlmentals here. A roof to keep the rain out. Three hots and a cot. A decent sex-life. Healthy bowels. But maybe the most fundamental my friend.

Because there’s something of all is what you’ve been missing, really nothing in the world that can measure up to a good night’s sleep, is there?”

“Boy, you got that right,” Ralph said.

Wyzer nodded. “Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man’s physician. Shakespeare said it’s the thread that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Napoleon called it the blessed end of night, and Winston Churchill-one of the great insomniacs of the twentieth century-said it was the only relief he ever got from his deep depressions. I put all that stuff in my papers, but what all the quotes come down to is what I just said: nothing in the whole wide world can measure up to a good night’s sleep.”

“You’ve had the problem yourself, haven) t you?” Ralph asked suddenly. “Is that why you… well… why you’re taking me under your wing?”

Joe Wyzer gri

“I think so, yes.”

“Hey, I can live with that. The answer is yes. I’ve suffered from slow-sleep insomnia ever since I was thirteen. It’s why I ended up doing not just one research paper on the subject but two.”

“How are you doing with it these days?”

Wyzer shrugged. “So far it’s been a pretty good year. Not the best, but I’ll take it. For a couple of years in my early twenties, the problem was acute-I’d go to bed at ten, fall asleep around four, get up at seven, and drag myself through the day feeling like a bit player in someone else’s nightmare.”

This was so familiar to Ralph that his back and upper arms broke out in goosebumps.

“Here comes the most important thing I can tell you, Ralph, so listen up.”

“I am.”

“The thing you have to h"ing onto is that you’re still basically okay, even though you feel like shit a lot of the time. All sleep is not created equal, you see-there’s good sleep and bad sleep. If you’re still having coherent dreams, and, maybe even nightmare important, luc,

–dreams, you’re still having good sleep. And because of that, a scrip 0 lo for sleeping pills could be about the worst thing in the world. for you right now. And I know Litchfield.

He’s a nice enough guy, but he loves that prescription pad.”

“Say it twice,” Ralph told him, thinking of Carolyn.

“If you tell Litchfield what you told me while we were walking down here, he’s going to prescribe a benzodiazepine-probably Dalmane or Restoril, maybe Halcion or even Valium. You’ll sleep, but YOu’ll pay a price. Benzodiazepines are habit-forming, they’re respiratory depressants, and worst of all, for guys like you and me, they significantly reduce REM sleep. Dreaming sleep, in other words.

“How’s your pie? I only ask because you’ve hardly touched it.”

Ralph took a big bite and swallowed it without tasting, “Good,” he said. “Now tell me why you have to have dreams to make your sleep good sleep.”

“If I could answer that, I’d retire from the Pill-pushing business and go into business as a sleep guru.” Wyzer had finished his pie and was now using the pad of his index finger to pick up the larger crumbs left on his plate. “REM stands for rapid eye movement, of course, and the terms REM sleep and dreaming sleep have become synonymous in the public mind, but nobody really knows just how the eye movements of sleepers relate to the dreams they are having.

It seems unlikely that the eye movements indicate ’watching’ or I tracking,” because sleep researchers see a lot of it even in dreams test subjects later describe as fairly static-dreams of conversations, for instance, like the one we’re having now. Similarly, no one really knows why there seems to be a clear relationship between lucid, coherent dreams and overall mental health: the more dreams of thit sort a person has, the better off he seems to be, the less he has, the worse.

There’s a real scale there.”

“Mental health’s a pretty general phrase", Ralph said skeptically.

“Yeah,” Wyzer gri

Anyway, we’re talking about some basic, measurable components: cognitive ability, problem-solving ability, by both inductive and deductive methods, ability to grasp relationships, memory-I, “My memory is lousy these days,” Ralph said. He was thinking of his inability to remember the number of the cinema complex and his long hunt through the kitchen cabinet for the last Cup-A-Soup envelope.

“Yeah, you’re probably suffering some short-term memory loss, but your fly is zipped, your shirt is on right-side out, and I bet if I asked you what your middle name is, you could tell me. I’m not belittling your problem-I’d be the last person in the world to do that-but I am asking you to change your point of view for a minute or two. To think of all the areas in your life where you’re still perfectly functional.”

how well you’re functioning, like a gas gauge in a car, or do they “All right. These lucid and coherent dreams-do they just indicate actually help you function?”

“No one knows for sure, but the most likely answer is a little of both. In the late fifties, around the time the doctors were phasing out the barbiturates-the last really popular one was a fun drug called Thalidomide-a few scientists even tried to suggest that the good steep we’ve been beating our gums about and dreams aren’t related.”