Insomnia Dreams

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries".


I have a theory about chronic insomnia - the kind that lasts for weeks or months. It's rarely actual insomnia. Instead, it's a dream of insomnia. We are not insomniac in bed. We're insomniac in a dream. While sleeping.

There's a way to check. If you're a chronic insomniac, next time you feel unable to sleep (after having laid still for a good while, and without a racing mind occupied with daily life issues), try to find your arms. As often as not, you will need to forcibly remind yourself where they are. You will need to reconstitute them.

The observation may not seem to offer much pragmatic help, but try this reframing which works for all sorts of insomnia:

Grant permission for some trusted, benevolent entity to whisk you and your bed elsewhere. You don't need to know where, or observe the journey. Swaddled comfortably in blankets, surrender control of the process and let it happen while you sleep. "Take me wherever," like the mindset of a trusting toy poodle stuffed into its owner's satchel.


This may explain why many people insist they get zero sleep but don't suffer from the expected health effects. They might be irritable or drowsy (from the anxiety of it), but do not present as never-sleepers

Other postings on Insomnia

Proportionality

There are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will give you a stern talking to.

There are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will punch you in the face.

And there are perfectly normal, reasonable people who, when they get angry, will blow up your house.

Proportionality is one of the least considered traits in the human realm. It's assumed to be part of the standard human basket of rational normality. Nice people don't blow up houses. Or so you'd think.

Nice people might be sloppy, or bad at sports, or tone-deaf, or cowardly, or color blind, or lazy, or have a nasty temper or poor taste. Nice people can be flawed in any number of ways, but proportionality doesn't seem like any separate thing. It seems like it should be baked into basic "niceness and normalcy," though it absolutely is not.

My father gave me this useful advice: "Somebody who kills a bunch of people? You can be friends with him. But somebody who suddenly kills his wife after 35 years of happy marriage; that guy you need to watch out for." Years later, I brewed up this corollary: "There's no reason to be scared of a hitman. A hitman is as unlikely to randomly kill you as an accountant is to randomly do your taxes."

For me, proportionality is even more insidious (though of course there's overlap in the Venn diagram). You might be able to get along with a murderer, but someone who lacks proportionality must never ever be your friend.

How can you know? The usual move is to evaluate a person as a whole, and, if they seem normal, reasonable and nice, feel assured that "they would never [etc]". But proportionality is not instantly observable, nor does it always accompany an appearance of normalcy.

Do you have any normal and reasonable friends who are oddly hawkish in their foreign policy opinions? That's not a political quirk. That's disproportionality. A girlfriend once told me how she'd sent an unspeakable package to someone who'd wronged her. I stuck with her, because, hey, it was just a story, and she seemed so normal and reasonable. She "would never" do the sort of thing she'd openly confessed to doing! She seemed proportional, though, Jesus Lord, she certainly was not.

Proportionality is something to watch for, and not let oneself be swayed by other aspects. People can lack it, while seeming perfectly nice...and rational...and normal.


Spitefulness is another under-feared quality. It's hard to define, but usually involves disproportionality. When spiteful people get a little mad, they might take a big bite out of someone. And remain faithful in their malice for some time. Yeesh.

Sorry, Manny

I'd like to apologize to my late cousin Manny.

Manny would always drive to a destination the day before an appointment, just to orient himself. Even if it was an hour or two away—in fact, especially if it was an hour or two away. I thought he was neurotic. No, he was right.

I've had innumerable restaurants on my check-out lists for years which, upon serendipitously passing en route to some other destination, suddenly became "available" to me in a way I can't account for. Intellectually knowing where they were was completely different from experiencing where they were. "Knowing" is a map, while experiencing is ownership. At that point, it was never more than a week or two before I'd go and try it.


An unboxed rice cooker has sat on my kitchen counter for a solid month. I'd love to tell a colorfully self-deprecatory story about how it terrified me; about how I was doing a Jed Clampett, confused by the microwave in his fancy new kitchen. But, no. I just lacked the inertia. I've actually craved rice over the intervening weeks, but my craving couldn't quite overcome the inertia.

Yesterday I tore the thing out of its box, tried to make sense of the instructions, examined the hackish packing materials (questioning, for the nth time, whether manufacturers flow returned items back into stock pool). I felt micro-disappointment at the flimsiness of the rice paddle, the imperfect size of the unit, and its disappointingly short power cord. And an ambiguity in the set-up instructions forced me to look to YouTube for clarification. Were any of these snags truly upsetting? God, no. I have bigger problems than short power cords. But, still, it was kinda short, and the snag was clocked.

So finally I actually own a rice cooker, and will happily cook rice upon momentary whim.

Serendipity

According to Murphy's law, with sufficient iterations things will screw up every possible way—and also some ways that seemed impossible. But Murphy also says that a zillion typing monkeys will produce Hamlet, however serendipitously. The key is spotting the serendipity.

This is not a small point.

Serendipity is not a great result, à la “Oh, look what happened!” Serendipity is in the noticing and valuing, and in the follow-up. You need wide-open receptivity to great results that aren't exactly what was expected. It's what pessimists call “optimism” and sane people call clarity. Serendipity is in the interpretation. The framing!

Even errors can inspire. A person who's made herself a sensitive receiver can tune serendipity from failure. This is the machinery behind the old platitude about making lemonade from lemons. It's not about blind persistence; it's about paying attention. The more attuned you are to serendipity, the more detection blurs into creation. You start getting lucky a lot.

So here's the pragmatic upshot: when catastrophe strikes, I take a beat, then flip myself into future past tense:

"Little did I know at the time that this seeming catastrophe created the conditions for something great to happen!"

I proceed straight toward that with nary a sigh. Who's got time to waste on drama? It's entirely a matter of serendipity detection/creation. When I remain wide open and deeply attuned (maybe adding eager joy to my mix, despite the recent catastrophe), serendipity starts popping up like mushrooms.

This sounds so blessedly easy! Why isn't it usually so simple? Readers hypnotized by the cartoon-like ease I've described may struggle to place their fingers on the frustrating part. Relax. Let me help you.

Here it is: None of this is available while histrionically lamenting the catastrophe.

We think we have a part to play; a dramatic obligation we've seen portrayed a thousand times in movies. Catastrophe means we grasp our head in pain and groan and furiously sweep all the papers off our desk and drink to excess and shrink into dejected shadows of our former selves. Time out for tantrums!

The lamentation trope is how we make it worse. We dump wet, gloppy cement over the scenario and patiently wait for our feet to be solidly stuck...just because it's what people do.

Calm is the prerequisite, catastrophe is the hinge.

The essential question is this: How fast can you calm the fuck down when the expected yumyum doesn't careen down the chute into your waiting maw? How soon can you pivot to the path that might later make you recall "Strangely enough, it turned out for the best!"? How much time will you waste playing the scene to its ridiculous hilt, perhaps wrecking absolutely everything just to flaunt how wrecked you felt?

Since we take our agony cues from movies, here's a classic movie moment that might de-program some unnecessary angst.



see also "Resilience Means Giving Serendipity a Chance"

Hat Trick

I often try to offer a bright reframing for the holiday season. Here's the 2025 offering.


When people seem unkind, unsympathetic, selfish, unpleasant, inconsiderate, nasty, and/or awful, there's a very helpful reframing you can pull out of your hat, on-demand. In case of emergency, BREAK HAT:

Most days, you can walk down the street without being punched in the face.

I know what you're thinking. That's an awfully low bar. If that's a blessing we're supposed to count—a "lucky star" to thank—then we've fallen mightily. But that's wrong. Think 150 years ago. Think 1,500 years ago. Think 10,500 years ago. Not-getting-punched-in-the-face is an amazing upgrade to the human operating system.

Even in my short life, I remember when it was acceptable to punch people in the face. If someone was a wise guy, or gave offense or disrespect, or looked at you funny, we'd punch that person in the face without regret or censure. We were a punching people.

And it wasn't some particular spike of violence peaking in the early 1970s. No, this was the trailing edge of human normalcy stretching back eons. Putting an end to that is new. Shocking, even. It is very much a blessing to count and a lucky star to thank. And that rumbling you hear is your ancestors shaking their fists at you for failing to appreciate it.

But forget the explanation and focus on the upshot: you can deem people awful, and human society fallen, but it's exceedingly unlikely that you'll be punched in the face today.

Another: there are places where if you use an iPhone conspicuously, there will be a small chance it will be stolen. But they will almost certainly not shoot you to get it, even though it's worth $1,000. No one will chop your hand off to acquire the extravagant bauble you're flashing publicly. And $1,000 is real money. There was a time when a woman needed bodyguards to hit the town wearing a diamond ring worth that much. But now one can safely flash a thousand bucks in most places. And in the rest, it might be surreptitiously grabbed. But with hardly anyone getting all choppy with you.

I won't flood you with myriad missed blessings. I've already done that a couple of times, (like here). But let me add one more mitigating observation about this brutal hell in which we frame ourselves.

If you get sick and must be rushed to the hospital, a special truck will come and pick you up in a jiffy, and everyone - every single person - will pull to the side of the road to let you by. Including important people and wealthy people. Including the many toxic, selfish people you deem barely human.

None of them will punch you in the face, nor smash your head in for a great big wad of cash, and they'll even pull their car aside to let you pass should you ever find yourself in extremis.

Oh, and one more thing (Columbo-style).

Why would these heady luxuries strike you as puny? Why would you feel pathetic taking consolation from them?

Is it possible—is it at all possible—that this indicates you are very, very, very, very spoiled and entitled, and that a nice bracing Ebeneezer Scrooge reframe (or Grinch heart-swelling) might restore you to sanity?

Merry Christmas everybody!

First Lesson by Phillip Booth

Wow, what a day.

I searched for this poem for forty years. Inquiries to poetry libraries, and to the estates of two poets I falsely remembered as possible authors, and to various generations of chatbots all yielded nothing. But now I have it.

I read it in 1983, at age 21, in The Sun magazine, and never lost the imagery and feeling of it. I can do this. In fact, I could as a child. But this was the first time I saw someone describe it. And there's great joy from finding an expression of what you'd found inexpressible.

Of course, it's not 1983. And you're not me. So this may not hit for you. But bear in mind that I'm not offering this as a fantastically great poem. Rather, it's an essential framing device. Which makes it, paradoxically, a fantastically great poem.

First Lesson

by Phillip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head

be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you. Spread

your arms wide, lie out on the stream

and look high at the gulls. A dead-

man’s float is face down. You will dive

and swim soon enough where this tidewater

ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe

me, when you tire on the long thrash

to your island, lie up, and survive.

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Echos in my life and in my writing:

The Tree
The Toddler and The Steering Wheel
Blogger as Blob
A Surprisingly Uplifting Examination of Suicide

Steeped in Portuguese Tradition

I normally patronize highly traditional bakeries, run by plucky octogenarians, which make me feel as if I've stepped out of a time machine. Here, for example, is my go-to place for glorious 20¢ bread rolls:

Today I hammered all the way back to the 19th century. Padaria Julião is a tiny shack perched on a windswept mountaintop, and it's too suffocating for me to feel comfortable taking photos, so I've stolen these:

This was a pilgrimmage for bolo reina, a sweet Christmas bread relatively lightly festooned with dried fruit (my blood sugar can't handle it's daunting sibling, bolo rei). The baker—who has the hollowed cheeks, dirty forehead, and gleaming eyes of a character from a Tarkovsky film—wouldn't stop emphatically pointing at the label, which said "com FAVA e BRINDE". It was printed in all-caps, with underlining, plus the baker-messiah agitatedly stabbing the letters with his coal-blackened finger.

I took home the bread, shot this quick photo after removing a slice,

...and popped it into the air fryer for a brief rewarm. Then I settled down at my computer to ask ChatGPT why "com FAVA e BRINDE" was so blazingly essential.

"Ah..." it began to reply, as I suddenly chipped a tooth.

"Flouting Portuguese and European law, they're doing this the old fashioned way, baking a fava bean and a Christmas king figurine right into the bread."

I looked down, and Hello, Santa. Yup.

His mouth was a little bloody, just like mine, and he was also half-cocooned in plastic wrap, perhaps serving as a dental warning strip, a petite Father Christmas condom, or else the remainder of a larger clot dissolved into the crumb, i.e. macropolymers. Portugal always aims big.

What's more, I'm ashamed to admit that I prefer modern bolo reina. This wood-fired bakery is normally dynamite, but the bolo reina was dull and gummy. I suppose it's because this item is so deadpan-traditional that no one intends or expects deliciousness. Bolo Rei is like repeating the lord's prayer. You're never aiming for some new angle. You speak the words and you're done.

Ah, tradition! Sometimes it's brutish inertia, never questioned, never improved. I recall my grandparents' disdain whenever they spoke of "the old country". Between my chipped tooth and the "meh" confection, I can hear them hollering "SEE???" from beyond the grave.

For once, I wanted to get back into the time machine and dial back to present day. Maybe go find some snazzy Lisbon cafe—"Baubles, Bangles, and Bolos" or whatever—and buy a shiny and exorbitant bolo reina tarted up with dried kumquats and nutella drizzle, with Santa in plain daylight riding a marzipan fricking reindeer.

David Lerner's Uneasy Relationship with Delight

Sylvia Carter, a food writer who was one of my mentors and also a favorite of David Lerner (the founder of the shimmeringly great Manhattan Mac store, Tekserve, who died recently), loved a quote from a soul food chef named Ruby, who said "If the people shut their eyes when they eat, that means someone back in the kitchen is keeping their eyes wide open."

It can be read lightly as a reminder that quality requires diligence. Or it can be considered more deeply as a profound insight about the self sacrifice required for delightful outcome. Delighters don't participate. They're rarely delighted. So why do they do it? Well, few do. Which explains why true delight is rare.

Until 1997, I was a brashly free-wheeling writer/musician. Never a leader, always a sideman, though too creative to be happy blindly following orders. In the 1990s, I perpetrated a series of larks, pranks, schemes, and brainstorms. Only one gained traction, but traction was never the goal—I did stuff to do stuff—so it threw me. When your kooky conceit succeeds beyond imagining, you're faced with the need to knuckle down and serve the machine. In the first installment of my series about the sale of Chowhound, I wrote:

I had started Chowhound as a lark, out of fondness for discussing food and swapping tips with others. But my life had come to have nothing to do with food or its discussion. It's a uniquely American problem: you start off with a passion and talent for something, and natural inertia draws you away from that thing and into managing a structure wherein others indulge their passion and talent for that increasingly distant-seeming thing. All energy winds up going into maintaining the structure, which is generic (you may as well be operating a tanning salon), and starkly divorced from your original interest. And so I found that I'd become a businessman, a manager, a marketer, an editor, a publisher, a retailer, an umpire, and, most of all, a tireless janitor, all in the interest of keeping alive an operation facilitating other peoples' discussion of food. None were roles I desired or enjoyed. I'm a writer and musician.

I shoveled coal at the tanning salon for ten years. I could not do my signature disappearing act because this, for once, was genuinely cool and useful. It rang every utopian bell in my fevered psyche. If not Chowhound, then what?

So I actually learned to manage, finding ways to ensure that Chowhound—which, in its raw state, was a cesspool of spam, mendacious raves, and out-and-out brawls—gave the impression of a sparkling wonderland of savvy, kindness, and on-the-level great tips. "What a swell group of guys!" enthused its users, as I managed an eyes-open staff while my own were splayed back like Malcolm McDowell's in Clockwork Orange.

I devised ways to recruit busy volunteer workers, and to acculturate them into our way of doing things while keeping it all as fun and delightful as the forum itself. I instituted a ground rule: "Show up whenever. If you get busy, or go on vacation, or just don't feel like it anymore, no problem, thanks for everything, and stop back if you ever get a spare minute." How well did this glue workers to our operation? When CNET bought the operation, every one of them stuck around to keep helping, unpaid.

They believed in the mission. As did I, so it was existentially necessary to glue it all together, forcing me to become a weirdly good manager against every inclination.


Tekserve was a Mac shop run by and for people who loved Macs in an age when this was a countercultural choice. Customers weren't treated merely "right", but delightfully so. It was a new model for principled retail. Not ala Starbucks or Ben & Jerry's, where a brand image is self-consciously stoked via cheezy gesture; David and his partner Dick really meant it. It was real, and this intention helped them stoke delight.

The new retail model never widely caught on, but we customers sure loved it. Tekserve had an antique Coke machine dispensing bottles for a nickel (they took a loss) and a porch swing hung from the rafters. Everything was ultra honest and helpful. It felt like bubblegum from Walter.

When I was very young, there was a substitute school bus driver named Walter, an older gentleman who'd periodically appear, like an apparition, and give out bubblegum to kids as they got on the bus.

It gobsmacked me that such a person could exist. Bus drivers - I recognized with the instinctive reflex of those low on a food chain - were a nemesis for children to fear and avoid. You don't need to be a particularly clever bunny rabbit to know to run like crazy when a german shephard comes prowling. So you get on the stupid bus, walk all the way to the back, and try to avoid setting off the driver at all costs.

Imagine if you discovered that a certain mosquito, once you slow down its whine, is actually singing Mozart arias just to soothe you.

Walter Crowther rocked my world. Representing more than just a good version of a bad thing, he spurred a fundamental shift in my childhood experience. It had never occurred to me that anything positive could ever come from a bus driver. I suddenly realized, thunderstruck, that the world was studded with hidden and delightful Easter Eggs. A hunk of bubblegum had squarely launched me on my life path.

David and Dick conjured the change they'd longed for. It entailed exhausting themselves and fighting their slackerish, non-corporate impulses. David was no manager (and Dick, who did design, didn't even try), but he was forced to figure it out. Intensely introverted and curmudgeonly to the point where his eyes could barely unroll themselves, he set mechanisms into play and let others inhabit them while he remained back in the kitchen with his eyes clockworked shriekingly open.

You might imagine an idealistic utopia masquerading as a business—where customers feel uncommon delight and workers feel part of something great—as run by a boss who's a jolly giggly teddy bear frequently hugging members of the happy family.

No. Jesus, no. There's no time or energy for that. If you have resources to devote to being that person, it means you're not leaving it all on the field. That's not a labor of love, that's an image of a labor of love. Real love means investing everything. No time for image creation or self-mythologizing. No room to seem delightful, or even to feel much delight. Those are all separate projects, and if you have assets leftover for all that, that means your eyes weren't fully open.

Ruby was not urging us to "enjoy the journey." The secret to making and keeping a thing delightful, and to stoking morale and preserving mission, is to work like a slave. For people to shut their eyes when they eat, someone in the kitchen keeps their eyes wide open.

Trying to do a cool thing, David was pressed into being a businessman and manager, both inherently uncool. But he never stopped finding ways to inject anomalous coolness; aka delight. His operation was delightful. His employees were delightful and delighted, and it rippled outward into a jolly enterprise imprisoning him in his basement office, compelling him to shovel coal interminably.

I rarely had time to read Chowhound postings and was eating cold cereal. David wasn't much of a Mac enthusiast by the end. He finally sold out, and Tekserve was in short order ruined and shuttered, just like Chowhound. He and I couldn't muster full-throated spite over the ignominious fate of our babies. We'd done what we'd set out to do, and, never feeling particularly capitalist, hadn't intended to create enduring operations. It was a ride, a lark, a utopian project that began and ended.

We showered strangers with candies for a while—really good ones, not just Werthers caramels—which they savored with their eyes clasped shut in delight.

Succinct Chatbot Argument

If you fake awareness super well, I've got news for you: only Awareness can do that.

Generational Healing

History is crammed full of societies suffering traumas and swiftly healing. They're back on their feet in no time, seen through a long lens.

I've written extensively about the psychological ravages of Covid quarantine. For example:

If someone is explaining astronomy to you and gets stuck remembering a term, and you fill in “gravitational lensing”, there is 0% probability they will stop their spiel, look freshly at you, and declare “Oh! You know astronomy!”

Pre-Covid, it was more like 60%.

They will continue their explanation - their performance - without hesitation. You have nothing to do with it. It’s like you’re not even there.

These lingering quarantine effects are seldom noticed because they involve a ratcheting up of narcissism, and it's difficult for narcissists to distinguish gradations of narcissism (they'd need to pay empathic attention to other people's internal life—the very thing they have trouble with).

It's not healing, either. A generation has been spoiled. And their children, raised by a spoiled generation, will be spoiled as well. And their children will be somewhat spoiled, third-hand. But, of course, in a few generations, we'll have more or less repaired. Toxic ripples will remain, but much of humanity's spice comes from residual rippling, for better and for worse.

So this generational span will seem, to posterity, like nothing at all. We were back on our feet in no time!

---

I used to be appalled by reforestation practices. Driving past large stands of trees planted stupidly in grids, I'd complain that these were no forests. They were more akin to farms.

It took me a long time to realize that the second generation of trees would seem more natural. And from the third on, it would be nothing but forest, through and through.