We all get the late-night willies sometimes. Last night was my sometime, the first in a good long while. What sets off a case of the bedtime jitters? Too many thoughts crowding together, all vying for attention? Underlying anxieties? Maybe crotchety old Scrooge nailed it when he dismissed Marley's ghost as "a blot of mustard, a bit of underdone potato."
I suspected that I was in for a long night when I dropped off to sleep as usual and a short while later literally sprang awake as I clawed my way out of your basic enclosed-space nightmare. Pushing myself up on my left arm to stretch out of the wood-and-glass cylinder trapping me, slowly the unyielding floor under my forearm morphed into the familiar tufted texture of my mattress and the curved glass lid dissolved into the faint never-dark of an inner city bedroom. Panic subsided. No amount of attention to the breath or repeating metta phrases to myself could stop the jitters from reasserting themselves. The problem with meditation practices is that they stop working once you drop off to sleep, and when you have the late-night willies, just about the first thing that comes bobbing up in your falling-asleep state is another frisson of whatever it was that got you jittery in the first place. You wake up abruptly, fretting and churning and back at square one. You're a stuck record, trapped in your own five-minute version of Groundhog Day. The cycle repeats until you give up altogether or fall uneasily asleep from sheer exhaustion.
In my case, both. At 2:00 AM I decided that enough was enough and changed locations, snuggling into my Snuggery, a serenely unruffled spare room that I have outfitted with soft fabrics, a couch, bookcases, lots of pillows, and two warm-light table lamps. The Snuggery isn't a candidate for Home Beautiful but it emits waves of calm and security. I curled up on the couch, wrapped myself up in an exquisite Nepalese wool shawl big enough to be a blanket, and got out my book—a lighter-than-air trifle from the 1950s about space cadets hunting big game in the jungles of Venus. Snuggery and low-voltage story did their job and I nodded off to a reasonably comfortable sleep on the couch. About 3:00 AM I went back to bed and managed to get through the night intact, albeit off and on. I'm groggy today.
My jittery thoughts came wrapped in an overriding thematic package: being unprepared, being late, and being hampered from doing my thing by forces beyond my control. Lack of preparation and non-punctuality are two of my biggest personal bugaboos, shortcomings that I treat almost like Class A felonies. I'm never late to anything. I'm never unprepared for anything. If you want to get my back up, make me late to an appointment. Hold me up. Get in my way. Watch the feathers fly.
In my jitters, a near-sleep dream started up in which I was teaching a Harmony class. I needed the looseleaf notebook containing my extensive collection of Harmony lectures, but I didn't have it. I had to go back to my office and get it. Except my office was far, far away—and I was thrashing through gelatinous air and fighting my way past tree limbs (I think they were Christmas trees) to recover my notebook. Yet I can give a Harmony lecture easily enough without notes; I know my stuff inside out, forwards, backwards, and every step in between. My muse is reliable and can come up with no end of trenchant examples on command. I have a deep knowledge of the repertory and so all I have to do is think something along the lines of prolongational neighboring augmented sixth chord and before you know it I'm playing an appropriate passage from the Brahms E Minor Cello Sonata by memory.
I don't need no stinkin' Harmony notebook. In everyday life, should I discover that I had left my Harmony notebook in my office, my internal reaction would be a simple screw it.
But there I was in dreamstate, utterly hamstrung without my gray looseleaf notebook, panicky and fretful and jittering with the heebie-jeebies. And powerless to fix the problem.
Just a quasi-dream, one of those sneak previews of sleep proper, the fading mindstate that either passes unnoticed or ends abruptly in a sudden bodily spasm. But a sleepy mirror of my insecurities and hangups.
Lots of people named Red in Cincinnati. Why did that little catchphrase keep coming up? Somehow it persisted when its originating half-dream dissipated into oblivion. Why did I remember it?
I'm lousy at playing shrink with myself or others. I'm going to guess—which is all shrinks do, anyway—that my head is discharging the accumulated cares and tensions of the semester just past. I'm not a 9-to-5 worker; my responsibilities are 24/7 and all over the map intellectually and artistically. I nail it all. Never late, never missed, never unprepared, never half-baked. That doesn't happen without copious mental discipline. Nobody can sustain it indefinitely. Now my spigot has opened a half-turn and some of the stale old goo is trickling out.
I daresay that's a good thing. It won't be long before I'm back in my everyday bullseye modus operandi. I'm self-administering a mental oil change. This week I came down with a head cold so slight that it really qualifies more as a cool rather than a cold. That's probably another sign of a loosening of intent; I'm not one for getting sick during a semester.
It's about time to give the house a top-to-bottom, soup-to-nuts cleaning. In the right circumstances that can be extraordinarily therapeutic. What's more, you can't make an appointment with a mop.