THE GOOD SLEEPER

Donal Lynch

‘H e hangs upside down until dusk, then he emerges.” This, with only slight exaggeration, is how my sleeping habits were once explained to a visitor to the family home, who may have wondered why I had not assumed my human form by mid-afternoon. I was probably in the middle of the kind of epic lie-in of which only teenagers and heroin addicts are generally capable.

Unlike most adults, who lose the knack of it as the years go on, sleep is not elusive for me. I can still nod off like a narcoleptic and can keep going like Ripley during her deep-space stasis in Aliens. Nine hours is child’s play. Ten is doable. Stress, if anything, makes me sleep more.

Jonathan Franzen once described sleep as like a “mistress... perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving and so respectable you can take her to the symphony”. But, of course, she is much cheaper than a mistress and has required, from me, only a dogged avoidance of children and alarm clocks. Sometimes suspicious friends paw at my face and wonder aloud if I’ve had ‘work done’ but the truth is I’ve just been more or less out cold since we last met. Botox couldn’t compare.

You would think that being constantly well-rested, and getting that amount of natural sleep, would make me very relaxed but, in fact, I remain in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance that my sleep will be disturbed. I hoard snooze time. If I feel a stressful period is coming up, I take to the bed for an orgy of sloth. I still feel I have PTSD from having to get up for dawn swimming sessions as a child. In those years, being sent to bed early was regarded as the worst punishment, whereas now it’s a thing I’d actively lobby for.

Whenever I have to go somewhere that a satisfactory lie-in might be iffy — I go cold at the mention of “someone’s couch” or “the camp bed” — or when I have to get some hideously early flight, I ‘tuck myself in’ (a knee-buckler of a sleeping tablet and a large glass of red wine), and make sure I’m like a sedated elephant by 8pm the previous night.

This is, of course, a fretful, worker-drone way of approaching sleep. The first and only time I got a first-class flight (a freebie), the revelation to me was not the leg-room or the free booze, but the way in which really rich people wear actual pyjamas in their seats and snuggle up in duvets at the gate, while the rest of us are bolt upright and wide awake in the back. I realised then that sleep is the most luxurious thing you can do.

Covid-19 has made sleeping a lot less shameful. With the endless hours of quarantine, it’s now morphed from ‘indulgence’ to ‘legitimate pastime’. A good many of us are waiting out the apocalypse on our mattresses. Speaking of which, I am an embarrassingly highmaintenance sleeper. People talk about sleep hygiene, and definitely having your phone nearby is killer, but equally bad, for me, is not have my set-up right. I’m a complete princess-and-the-pea with mattresses, for one thing (plush, king, quilted, please). To truly fall into a Rip Van Winkle coma, I also need zillion-count Egyptian-cotton sheets, blackout blinds and a fan circulating air in the room.

Hotels are generally atrocious for these kinds of facilities — even the fanciest ones often have sheets that feel like nylon curtains — and, when in one, I live in constant terror of my slumber being interrupted by housekeepers. And don’t get me started on those single mattresses you have to push together to form an actual bed that are all over continental Europe...You can kid yourself that you’re recovering from life on a holiday, but the only place for serious sleep is your own bed.

If getting loads of sleep sounds insufferably smug, the flip side of it is that I am not a morning person. To the point where it is almost a disability. First light feels like that moment in an old-fashioned cinema reel when the celluloid falls off its roll and there is a moment of jarring white. When the dawn floods through my blind, I generally feel I might turn to dust. I hiss at the light, like a threatened cat. I have protocols of waking — slow stages, such as ‘staring at the ceiling’ and ‘sitting catatonic on the edge of the bed’ — that precede anything as practical as putting on trousers.

Russell Brand says that the reason that you should meditate in the morning is that it helps you transition between dreams (signs, symbols, nameless fears) and the jarring reality of the day. But I’ve found an equally effective technique is simply to go back to sleep. I grab my sleep mask (which, I promise, is the most Joan Crawford item I own), push my Boots soft-silicone earplugs so deep that they are smooshing against my brain, and try to pretend it isn’t happening. I’m fully aware I’d be a better, more productive person if I hauled myself up and flung the curtains open, but the best sleep of all is morning sleep. And, in a world where we are all henpecked by our phones, it’s the last truly rebellious thing you can do.