Letters at 3AM

When I was a child I had no bedtime. "Bedtime" is not a Mediterranean concept. My family and relatives still lived in as much a Sicilian, Mediterranean rhythm as they could manage in New York City. It was their way to not serve dinner until 9 or so at night, and it wasn't unusual for small children to be up at 10, even 11 or 12. In the warm months, little kids prowled the streets until well after dark, because there was no air conditioning in our tenements and those rooms were stuffy, steaming, and smoke-filled (all our parents smoked); we ate pasta most nights, and the boiling water made the already humid apartments tropical. In summer, the sheets were wet with your sweat soon after you lay down; you tossed and turned and did not so much fall asleep as finally go unconscious. In winter, the wet air of cooking and (inadequate) steam heat combined with the area's natural humidity so that the damp bore into your bones -- even under all the winter coats that were piled on our bedding like the furs of primitive peoples (which, of course, we were). Buried under that almost comforting weight, the sheets warmed only where they touched your body; when you moved in your sleep, the icy sheet you rolled onto woke you again.

We were poor. Everyone we knew was poor. There was always a meal, but it was often just macaroni soaked in butter. It filled but didn't nourish. You went to bed stuffed but still hungry. That, too, made for restless sleeps. So children in our neighborhoods had dark circles under their eyes, as all poor children do. No one thought this unusual or unnatural. Our families had been poor for generations; there had always been dark circles under the eyes of the children.

I note all this because it must have had something to do with the strangeness of my sleep -- though I didn't think it was strange then. No doubt other factors contributed. I was, not surprisingly, a sickly child; since then I've learned that the many high fevers I suffered -- often nearing 105 -- might well have altered, if not damaged, my brain. Add to that the family troubles that afflict the rich as well the poor (incest, trauma, madness), and it's a wonder that any of us slept at all. In any case, I thought everyone experienced sleep as I did, so I never thought to speak of it.

From when I was very little, two phenomena recurred every night during the nether-time between waking and full sleep.

One was this: For what seemed very long moments I felt that I was falling ... falling through an infinite blank space, in the very position in which I was lying ... falling straight down. I would realize I was falling, experience the falling in a still sort of way, then with my heart pounding I would begin to flail, at which the bed would seem to reappear and the sensation would stop. Or, again with heart pounding, I would not flail, I would clutch -- grab at the bed as though it were a ledge I had landed on and I did not want to bounce off and fall again. The strange thing is (one strange thing is) that though my body was terrified my mind was calm. What caused this split I cannot say; there are plausible explanations (many traumatized people have severe mind-body splits), but they don't explain enough. Mainly, they don't explain the quality of that calm.

I know now that though we speak of "the mind" or "the psyche," there is no such thing as the mind, the psyche. We each contain a manyness that one life is not long enough to explore or express. The mind is less like a computer or a three-leveled structure (superego-ego-id), than it is like a forest, an ecosystem in which many plants, creatures, and rocks form an ever-shifting but consistent unity. I experienced these falls of nether-sleep both as a terrified human body and a creature of the forest, small and still and utterly alert -- a creature that could wait and think a long time, even in moments of danger, and that knew things the body did not know. So the two or three times I fell almost every night were experienced simultaneously in two separate ways. I feel now that what my body learned from those falls was that the end is always near; and what that watchful creature learned was that even when everything is out of control, even when you're falling, there is always (or usually) just a little time left to be what you are, and to choose what that is. Now I believe that what I was really learning was how not to go insane.

I've often been crazy, sometimes really crazy -- but I've always been able to stop at the edge of insanity. I've been crazy enough, and I've seen enough insanity, to arrive at a definition of insanity: Insanity is a state in which nothing is real to you but yourself, while at the same time you're not in charge of yourself. Both aspects are terrifying. It is a terror with no release, a terror that medication can dull but cannot assuage. Insanity is a state of disconnection; the drugs keep you disconnected, and so keep the insanity in stasis; you don't act out but you can't get out. Delicate human contact (by which I mean psychotherapy's "talking cure") can do much good, because connection is the only fruitful treatment for a disease of disconnection; but great skill is needed and such skill is rare. In the falls of nether-sleep I learned to retain my sense of self while falling, yet also to retain my connection to what I was falling through ... whatever that was.

It took many falls to learn this. Two, three, even four times almost every night, well into my teens. Then the falls ceased. I believe they ceased because I'd learned the lesson that they were given to me to teach ... though I didn't articulate that lesson (as I have above) until much later.

The second thing that happened every night was stranger still. In between falls, I heard voices. Read this sentence aloud: I heard them as clearly as you're hearing your own voice. The voices came in two forms simultaneously. The first was as though there was a gathering in the next room, several (sometimes many) people engaged in conversation, and I would hear fragments of their conversation that made no sense in themselves but seemed to relate to some subject I couldn't understand. The second form of the voices was this: my name, called out in different tones and different ways by different voices. Not "Mike," as my family called me; not "Speed," the name I would be given by other kids; but "Michael," as (in those days) only my mother called me. (Yes, that's a ripe fact for psychoanalysis; for years I spent thousands of dollars exploring that fact; it wasn't a waste of money -- I learned a great deal -- but it didn't explain the voices.) Various voices (not my mother's) would say, in various tones, whispering, shouting, speaking plainly, softly, sometimes coaxing, sometimes hissing: Michael. Michael. MICHAEL! MICHAEL! Miiiiiiii-chaelllllllllll. MI-chael. Even singsong: Mi-IIIIII-iiii-chaellll-LLLLLLL-lllll.

Every. Single. Night. Until I was 27 years old and, on 14th Street in Lubbock, I told Janette about my voices and dear Janette said, simply, "Why don't you ask them what they want?"

That night when I heard them I sat up in bed and said: "What do you want?"

And they stopped.

That is, they stopped speaking every night. It came to me that what they wanted was to be acknowledged. They wanted my understanding that they were trying to help me and that when they spoke I should pay attention -- not to them, but to the fact that the everyday is a veil beyond which something else is going on that requires close attention.

Since then, every once in a while, usually during the day when I'm wide awake, a voice (always a different voice and just as real as any person's voice) will say my name, calmly but with an underlying sense of urgency: Michael.

Put your theories back in your pockets, or wherever you keep them. The final right of a human being is: the right to define your experience in your own terms. In the end, every right can be taken from you but that. My definition of this whole experience:

The voices calling my name wanted me to acknowledge, once and for all, that this world that calls itself "the world" is not the only world; that we are called to be our true selves by forces beyond ourselves. They stopped calling every night when I acknowledged their right to want something of me. They occasionally call still, when I need to be reminded that this day has some special importance; that I'd better pay close attention; that I am not the center of even my own universe; that I too am the butterfly whose wings can cause hurricanes or sweet nurturing rains; and that I matter only insofar as I take responsibility for who and what I am while I fall.