"Do you think you’ll do your weird sleep thing?" my friend says, "Or that you’ll sleep normally?"

I bristle. She’s an old friend from college, a psychologist, board-certified in sleep medicine. I know she has thoughts about this. I’m staying at her house, and we're talking about my giving her a hug goodbye at 5 the next morning when she leaves for the gym before work, since I’m driving home that day.

My voice is low, reproachful. "You know that my normal is to be awake at that time," I say. "I’ll be up."

I’m what they call a segmented or biphasic sleeper. Nearly every night for 18 years now, I’ve woken up in the middle of the night for a period of 2-3 hours before going back to bed.

She catches herself, aware that she’s touched a nerve. I don’t speak to her much about this because I feel like she sees this thing, my “broken sleep,” as a problem to be solved, whereas I decided to accept it a long time ago. 

***

I was 26 and in graduate school when the night wakes started. A restlessness would take me in the middle of the night, usually at 2 or 3am, lasting a couple of hours. In those early years I would be aware of some part of my mind furiously chewing on something in the night. I'd ruminate on things that felt unfinished: situations, relationships, conversations.

If I didn’t get out of bed, I would be exhausted in the morning, as if my brain had spent the whole night in overdrive-- the equivalent of a sore jaw after chewing on a tough, flavorless piece of gum for much too long, or what my aging laptop has been doing, running hot with full fans even though I haven't touched it for hours.

***

My first memory of being fully awake in the middle of the night, I was in London, in a large standalone house with a short garden wall around it in the dreamily named but terribly mundane, South London suburb of Hither Green. I was renting from a friend of my cousin's, a man named Steve. Steve was a builder, and had purchased the house with the intention of fixing it up.

It didn't need much in the way of repair, but it hadn't been redecorated since the 1970s— the downstairs was lined with dark brown shag carpeting and garish dark pink and gold wallpaper, with correspondingly loud furniture.

A lot had changed for me in the previous year: an overdue breakup, leaving my finance job, deciding to go back to graduate school, and finally making it to London. I still smoked in those days, and after several miserable nights tossing and turning in bed, I got up and went downstairs and helped myself to some tobacco from the packet of Drum that Steve kept on the dining room shelf. Surrounded by the lurid pink wallpaper, I sat and rolled cigarettes.

I fretted about being awake at night in those early days. It felt abnormal, opposite to everything I had learned about how one is “supposed” to sleep. Is something wrong with me, I thought, that I'm such an insomniac?

I worked my way through all of the sleep hygiene advice: Exercise. Darkening the room. Not eating too late. Limiting caffeine intake and stopping after a certain time of day. Dim evening lighting (never a problem for me). A consistent bedtime. A wind-down routine. Reading quietly in bed. (Screens in bed weren't yet a thing.)

None of those strategies changed anything, so I started looking at weirder advice. For the record, eating lots of potatoes didn't help. The logic was that since potatoes contain tryptophan and potassium, which in turn produce serotonin, eating them is sleep inducing.

Upping my potato intake did not induce better sleep. It was, however, delicious while it lasted.

***

After graduate school, I returned to New York. I went back to work, a 9-5 museum job. By this time the wake window had moved. I'd be up at 4, only to get sleepy again around 7— disastrous when I had to be up and functional at 8. 

That first year, I wrested myself out of bed after my “disturbed” sleep each morning. I would haul myself into the office as soon I could—which often ended up being somewhere between 9:36 and 9:39am, with surprising consistency.

I would push through the day. I would be exhausted.

And then the next day, I'd do it again.

***

My father’s apartment was on the 31st floor of an Upper East Side building with large corner windows. I’d moved into his spare room when I returned to New York and had a breathtaking view of the city when I would wake. I could see the moon over the East River, and thousands of mostly– but not all, never all!— dark windows stippling the buildings around us and down through southern Manhattan.

It was stunning. It was peaceful. 3am is as quiet as it gets in New York. While I still had plenty to pass the time with, there were no people to distract me. The Problem of being awake at that time had distressed me at first. But a couple years in, something clicked.

I enjoyed this time of night.

I loved the quiet. I loved how different the energy of the world was.

***

After that first year at the museum, a year of consistent under-sleep, I went to my boss and said look, this is a thing I deal with. I was starting to get migraines from the exhaustion.

By then, I’d proved myself at the job. He said as long as you come in by 11 and get everything done that you’re supposed to, you're fine.

And I did. I happily stayed late, and would arm the security system and lock up behind myself most nights. I felt immensely better.

***

Still, this is not how the world functions, is it? Even though work was very accommodating I felt obligated to figure out my insomnia, as I was still calling it.

I saw a doctor who tried a few different medications, none of which worked. Lunesta was supposed to help me drop back to sleep when I woke. It didn't. Same with the other meds and supplements (yes, I’ve tried melatonin; no, I'm not taking any other questions).  My night wake window was stubborn—on stronger medication I would still be awake in the night, just also groggy. Ultimately, I abandoned the effort to fix my sleep with pills.

Eventually, the doctor suggested a sleep study at Weill Cornell's new sleep medicine center. It's brand new, she told me. You'll be the first person to sleep in that room.

On the night of the study, they told me to report to the waiting room around 9:30pm. It was not fluorescent, at least, but it was brightly lit, contravening their own sleep hygiene advice, as given in the pamphlets in that very room.

I was shown to what felt like a spartan and cheaply-lit hotel room, or perhaps a spacious dorm room. It had a double bed, some closet space, and a door leading off to a bathroom. It was brand new. I was the first person who was going to be sleeping in it.

The (male) technician attached a number of things to my head and face: a breathing tube, something that suctioned to my forehead, electrodes for my temples and several others on my scalp. This took some time. I sat awkwardly as he parted my hair and applied Vaseline so the adhesive didn't pull on it when removed. Everything was connected by wire to a machine that hung on a wheeled pole, like an IV bag.

I took a few selfies. I looked like I'd been in an accident. Medical tape held the tubes and wires in place on both cheeks, my chin, and in my hair.

In order to go to the bathroom, I had to call the (once again, male) technician to assist me because of all the attachments. I had privacy, but first he had to accompany me into the bathroom to position the apparatus so that the electrodes wouldn’t detach.

Once the (MALE!) technician finished the process, he told me:

1. that the lights would be off, and

2. there was an INFRARED CAMERA MONITORING SYSTEM so that he and his colleague (ALSO MALE) would be able to OBSERVE ME AS I SLEPT, and

3. since THERE WAS ALSO A MICROPHONE, I could just tell them verbally when I needed to use the bathroom.

"Okay sleep well," he said, and closed the door behind him.

"Well," they told me in the morning, "you don't have sleep apnea."

(I already knew this.)

"You didn’t seem to sleep well," they said.

"Funny," I replied. My tone was lost on them.

It was 6am. I had eventually managed to drop off, but this was now technically my in-between wake time. I’d slept maybe 4 hours. There was to be no measuring of what was going on for me physiologically during the in-between period, or recording of the second sleep, or comparison of the two sleep segments. Any of this would have been interesting to me.

I told the doctor on the way out that the waiting room lights were extremely bright, and perhaps this was something to address, per their own advice. "That's really great feedback!" she said cheerfully.

In the end, the sleep study turned up nothing useful.

It was, however, a turning point. I became skeptical of the sleep experts. And I began to wonder whether my waking in the night was perhaps not a problem, but rather just… how I slept.

After all, it had been four years.

***

I asked another close friend, a doctor who had spent years working in a sleep clinic, what her thoughts were.

"You can stitch your sleep together with medication," she said.

"That hasn't worked," I replied.

"There are stronger meds," she told me.

"So—taking strong sleeping medicine each night? Indefinitely?"

"Yes," she said.

This did not appeal.

***

I tried to troubleshoot around it, I really did. I tried to find a solution for when I absolutely needed to be awake and functional in the morning.

I got a prescription for Ambien. The doctor, a different one now that I was in graduate school, said I could take one or two pills, 5 or 10mg. 5mg wasn't enough to stitch my sleep together—I was still up as usual, now just in an Ambien fog—but 10 was.

I was staying with my brother in Los Angeles to attend a conference for which I had to be up early. He let me borrow his beloved blue Mini Cooper. The night before my presentation, I took 10mg of Ambien to ensure that I would sleep through the night, which sure enough, I did. In the morning, I drove my brother to work. I noticed that my body was a bit sluggish. There was a slight delay between my desire to do something and my body’s ability to execute it.

I hit a pillar in his parking garage and put a dent in his car because I couldn’t react in time. Estimated cost, $1,200.

God, I thought. At least nothing happened on the road.

I never took Ambien again.

***

There are many downsides to being a PhD student. It's an economic setback to be in school for so long as an adult at the bottom of a highly stratified institution, and a lot can go wrong. But having almost complete control over my time was a huge upside. During those seven years, I was able to arrange my life so that I was able to sleep as my body wanted to. It was life-changing.

Sleeping until 10:30 or 11am, scheduling days to avoid needing to be anywhere in the morning– living like this means living at odds with the world. It was a frequent complaint of one of my exes that we could never make morning plans. The repeated refrain hurt, more than I realized at first. 8 years in, I had come to understand this as something I couldn’t change– not without medicating myself heavily every night. I had accepted it in myself, but still would apologize, downplay, or demur, feeling as if I was somehow deficient or wrong.

There’s a judgmentalness around sleeping late, an implication of laziness. And there is SO much advice. I got tired of it. I learned to be careful whom I mentioned it to, and how, and I became an excellent deflector. It helped when I stopped using the word “insomnia.”

***

"I've figured it out," my friend’s email began. "You are preindustrial!"

This was a good friend from grad school, who was researching, of all things, the history of somnambulism, or sleepwalking. She’d forwarded me an article about how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there is documented evidence of people having had a middle of the night wake period where they read, prayed, visited one another, and/or had sex.

It was called dorevelle, French for wake-sleep. It's a good descriptor, but I found myself resistant to using a cutesy, anachronistic European name for it since the thing itself is so squarely at odds with a clock-driven, Western-capitalist way of being.

But there was something I found interesting here: The assertion that this kind of sleep pattern, my deep eccentricity, the thing that put me out of pace with the rest of the world, was once— dare I say it?— normal.

***

My screen is thin at that time of day. My defenses are down. The emotional thickening I normally have on me is gone. I have learned to ask my spouse not to discuss anything serious with me if we cross paths, not to talk to me about what is going on in the world, not to discuss logistics. I am emotionally labile at that time. I am easily activated. Middle-of-the-night me is a different creature than daytime me, and solitude is best.

This was a discovery. Depending on when my night wake window happened, my spouse and I would sometimes encounter each other if I was up late enough that they, an early riser, were getting up for the day. "Nothing serious," I tell them. "Only light things."

We learned our lesson the hard way, when conversations that would otherwise be utterly mundane —  on what dates should our friend visit? should we call the landlord about this repair?— ended with me completely overwhelmed.

***

Non-normative sleep is a thing in my family.

My older brother had sleep apnea. He used to medicate himself to sleep at night, usually with Xanax. Eventually, he got a CPAP machine. I was with him when he got it. The difference was stark and immediate. My brother, a salty, acerbic Gen-Xer at the best of times, actually woke up cheerful—pirouetting-in-a-meadow cheerful, compared to his usual state.

I never had sleep apnea, but I did later wonder if his regular use of Xanax was obscuring a sleep pattern like mine.

I’m not sure when it became the case that even a small chink of light would wake me. I sleep with an eye mask that is essentially a wearable face cave.  My younger brother is also extremely light-sensitive. When blacking out my room I took inspiration from his delightfully chaotic solution in college, which was to just nail a carpet over his window.

He is not a segmented sleeper, but he is an odd one. His theory is that he has a 26- rather than 24-hour circadian rhythm, and so his sleep schedule makes regular transits around the clock. I joke that he is a poorly programmed alien, sent to earth to make observations, but whose settings are a little off.

The three of us share a father. This man, our dad, is not a troubled sleeper. In fact, he can sleep anywhere. Ever since I can remember, he has spent some portion of the day asleep on the couch—airplanes, cars, sofas, no problem (unlike me).

But he is a biphasic sleeper too.

"I just don't get out of bed," he tells me. "The trick is, you cannot let your brain get going. I put YouTube on and play something, and fall back asleep."

"I've tried this," I tell him. "It doesn't work for me. I just spend countless hours awake in bed. And I can't fall asleep with sound."

I find it interesting that there might be a genetic component to this. Maybe it's just a variation. Could it not be useful to a collective to have someone who spends part of the night awake? Is this not a potentially helpful difference, like high sensitivity or the queer auntie/uncle phenomenon? Like, maybe not ideal if everyone is a certain way, but there being a few with certain traits helps the group?

I sometimes wonder whether there were people in my lineage who were awake in the deep of night like me, and who, instead of looking out at the expanse of a city skyline, sat up with dying embers underneath the stars.

***

I can get away with one or two days of being under-slept, but more than that and I get migraines.

After graduate school, I started traveling for my consulting work. When people who are paying your travel expenses ask you to be somewhere at 8 or 9am, it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to tell people who are flying you out and paying for a hotel that you cannot start your day before 12pm. Impossible, in fact, when you’re just starting out.

I went through a lot of migraine medication in those days.

Then the pandemic. Work slowed to a crawl. But when it started back up, remotely, I suddenly had complete control over my schedule. It was magical. Four months in, I stopped refilling my prescriptions because I had accumulated so much medication that I never took, and barely needed anymore.

***

My spouse hears me tell a colleague why I need to keep scheduling to the afternoon hours one day. "You're very breezy about it," they say. "I've seen you when you get migraines. They're debilitating. You have a disability and are acting like you don't."

I blink when they tell me this. It hasn’t occurred to me. They aren’t wrong. Migraines are a legally covered disability. I manage mine by structuring life so that I don’t need to be anywhere before 1pm, which enables me to get enough sleep not to trigger them.

I get why I have to describe it as such. But I don't feel disabled unless I have to conform to what the world thinks is normal: defaulting to morning hours, starting a meeting or workshop at 8 or 9 or even 10am, or treating early rising as a virtue, some sort of moral good. I joke with colleagues and clients: better 10pm than 10am. But it's not a joke. I frequently work at 10pm, or long past, with clients and colleagues in other time zones, and I am thrilled that this is possible.

14 years in, the spiel becomes that I manage a sleep and migraine disorder that I have to structure my life around. I don’t love the word disorder, but it elicits so much less advice, and less judgment.

***

My new friend is Camissa South African and training in her foremothers' medicine ways. I talk about the night wakes in a workshop that we're both taking. Half the class is on Zoom, half in person.

"The ancestors are talking to you," she says from the screen. The other facilitator, who is also South African, and also tuning in remotely, nods in agreement. People are much more comfortable discussing such things openly there.

"That has happened to me sometimes," she says. "The ancestors keep me awake, night after night, until I listen and figure out what they're telling me. And when I do, I can sleep again."

I have a moment of quiet panic that turns into a couple of weeks of unvocalized fretting that for 17 years, the problem has been that I am too obtuse to hear what the ancestors are trying to tell me.

***

At night, in the quiet hours, after everyone has gone to sleep, when you're awake, when you live with sensitive sleepers like the one I am married to, even the most mundane sound is magnified.

Walking across wooden floors? The squeaking is REALLY LOUD.

Opening a bread bag, reaching in, and pulling out a piece of bread? THIS IS SHOCKINGLY LOUD.

Taking a dish out of the cabinet and setting it on the counter? Unless you are extremely meticulous and ensure that it only makes contact with things extremely gently, or put things down on dish towels (which I do, because this is my life now) DISHES ARE REALLY FUCKING LOUD—even picking a dish up is IMMENSELY LOUD – try it and see.

At one point I start eating with a reusable plastic spoon so that I don't clink against the bowl and wake my spouse.

Have you ever listened to the sound of butter being spread on toast? At 3am, it is THUNDEROUSLY LOUD. I've gotten sleepy, disgruntled texts from the bedroom about this.

Opening the fridge? Pouring water from the dispenser? Ice clinking into a glass? ABSOLUTELY DEAFENING when you're afraid you're going to wake a sensitive sleeper.

***

I am again at my sleep psychologist friend's house. I've been there for a few days, spending my night wakes downstairs in her living room.

We talk more about it. This time, she asks me about how it manifests and how it feels. I appreciate her curiosity. She then asks the classic psychologist question. "Does it cause you distress?"

"No," I say. "Not anymore."

***

18 years in, I have a routine. I wake around 3:30 or 4. I return to bed between 6 and 7.

I married an early sleeper, who sleeps "normally," through the night, and who, unfathomably, has become someone who bounces out of bed and onto a spinning bike at the gym at first light. Whereas my preferred exercise routine involves a nighttime martial arts class that begins not long before their bedtime.

Sometimes I time it so that I return for my second sleep a few minutes before I know their alarm will go off. I’ll slip quietly into bed. They’ll turn and, still mostly asleep, wrap their arms around me, and pull me into them. These are some of my favorite moments of the day– indeed, of my life– when I’m nestled against them in the quiet of early morning.

Here, and especially in these moments, there is sweetness, peace, and a world that is not at odds with me.

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Leena Sulahri is a recovering academic with an eye for how the mundane, the sublime, and the absurd frequently occur together. She is a muslim-ish, diasporic South Asian raised in the Arab Gulf region, and very, very gay.

ART:
Cynthia Yatchman