Night thoughts
I once read in a Calvin and Hobbs strip that the reason the night is dark is so that people can worry free of distraction. Too bloody right. For reasons far to complex to go into (I am cutting down on the amount I drink and hence not sleeping as soundly as was my habit), I've woken up once or twice recently in the dead of night, too early to do anything useful like get up and potter, too late to put on the light and read oneself back to sleep. My main occupation during these periods has been to have thoughts as dark as the world outside my tightly drawn bedroom curtains.
Dark as it might be, it's not as dark as the sleepless hour I once spent in Norfolk, where the nearest light pollution comes from an oil rig off the coast of Denmark. The benefit can be seen on a moonless, cloudless night, when the upturned bowl of the heavens is both beautiful and terrifying and makes you wonder if somebody slipped something into your soup or whether all that can actually be real.
If you're not quite awake, then its time to exploit that lazy half of your mind that loafs around, occasionally getting you into trouble with Fraudian prompts. Your subconscious forms the function of your own personal Wikipedia meets IMDB. It's true, if you can manage to just keep the right side of consciousness, so that you have control over your thoughts but can keep the door to your subconscious ajar, then faces, names and events from the past long consigned to annoying anonymity can be accessed or, even better, made up. The only drawback is that anything thus accessed seems to fade along with the morning dew, leaving one with an unexplained nostalgic melancholia that one normally passes off as an unusual reaction to last night's take away.
But the night is really made for worrying and for magnifying fears. In the daylight hours that creaking garden gate might mean that some well meaning friend is dropping by with a chilled crate of some fresh and cheeky white that he is too excited about to delay trying, who doesn't like to drink alone and who has brought along his portable digital radio, already tuned to Test Match Special. Set up the deck chairs, throw away the tasting notes and get ready to have opinions almost as ill informed as those of Geoff Boycott.
At night however, the creak is a different proposition. At the very least, it's a concern that a squeaky hinge means you have one more chore for the weekend, only slightly offset by the cheering thought that you'll get to sniff WD40 again, perhaps the most pleasing aroma to be associated with anything mechanical since Phillipa Forrester quit Robot Wars. Going up the sliding scale of irrational worries we have concerns about midnight badgers and, if you decide to go straight to paranoid loopyness, werewolves.
Night thoughts travel in packs. If you're not careful they can crowd out any rationality. The best strategy is to try and displace them with something. Erotica is the blunt instrument of derailing negative thoughts, but even then you need to be careful, as in the dead of night pleasing thoughts about the check out girl at the local grocer can turn to the dread concern that you forgot to buy olive oil the last tine you were there. Practical thoughts, such as convincing yourself that now is just the right time to unknot that tricky issue you have been trying to think through at work, are a mistake, as if you do hit on a solution you'll never remember it and if you don't, then the realisation that the project is irrevocably fucked is not going to help matters.
The solution is to be ruthlessly positive. The only thing that irrational night thoughts understand is irrational sunny thoughts. Corny but effective. You probably won't remember exactly what you were thinking about when you wake up the next morning, but you may well spend the morning suffused with a quite irrational sense of well being. Much to the annoyance of everyone around you.
Dark as it might be, it's not as dark as the sleepless hour I once spent in Norfolk, where the nearest light pollution comes from an oil rig off the coast of Denmark. The benefit can be seen on a moonless, cloudless night, when the upturned bowl of the heavens is both beautiful and terrifying and makes you wonder if somebody slipped something into your soup or whether all that can actually be real.
If you're not quite awake, then its time to exploit that lazy half of your mind that loafs around, occasionally getting you into trouble with Fraudian prompts. Your subconscious forms the function of your own personal Wikipedia meets IMDB. It's true, if you can manage to just keep the right side of consciousness, so that you have control over your thoughts but can keep the door to your subconscious ajar, then faces, names and events from the past long consigned to annoying anonymity can be accessed or, even better, made up. The only drawback is that anything thus accessed seems to fade along with the morning dew, leaving one with an unexplained nostalgic melancholia that one normally passes off as an unusual reaction to last night's take away.
But the night is really made for worrying and for magnifying fears. In the daylight hours that creaking garden gate might mean that some well meaning friend is dropping by with a chilled crate of some fresh and cheeky white that he is too excited about to delay trying, who doesn't like to drink alone and who has brought along his portable digital radio, already tuned to Test Match Special. Set up the deck chairs, throw away the tasting notes and get ready to have opinions almost as ill informed as those of Geoff Boycott.
At night however, the creak is a different proposition. At the very least, it's a concern that a squeaky hinge means you have one more chore for the weekend, only slightly offset by the cheering thought that you'll get to sniff WD40 again, perhaps the most pleasing aroma to be associated with anything mechanical since Phillipa Forrester quit Robot Wars. Going up the sliding scale of irrational worries we have concerns about midnight badgers and, if you decide to go straight to paranoid loopyness, werewolves.
Night thoughts travel in packs. If you're not careful they can crowd out any rationality. The best strategy is to try and displace them with something. Erotica is the blunt instrument of derailing negative thoughts, but even then you need to be careful, as in the dead of night pleasing thoughts about the check out girl at the local grocer can turn to the dread concern that you forgot to buy olive oil the last tine you were there. Practical thoughts, such as convincing yourself that now is just the right time to unknot that tricky issue you have been trying to think through at work, are a mistake, as if you do hit on a solution you'll never remember it and if you don't, then the realisation that the project is irrevocably fucked is not going to help matters.
The solution is to be ruthlessly positive. The only thing that irrational night thoughts understand is irrational sunny thoughts. Corny but effective. You probably won't remember exactly what you were thinking about when you wake up the next morning, but you may well spend the morning suffused with a quite irrational sense of well being. Much to the annoyance of everyone around you.
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