Summer Splash Supplement 2010
I sometimes find that on the days where I wake up before my alarm, or on the days where, for whatever reason, an alarm hasn't been set, (where internal signals, or even external signals additional to an alarm call, are the reason for my waking at that time), my instinctive reaction, irrespective of the room's darkness or the room's light, is to check what the time is. And now, it is always on these occasions, where my waking has been the result of not my alarm clock but something else, that I make it my duty to evaluate the time, the exact time on the clock when I wake, and to look for any messages that may be hidden within that time, because there have been occasions in the past where these messages have, against all manner of logical reasoning, proven to be – and I acknowledge the obvious craziness of these words – adequate predictors of the forthcoming day.
I will make this a little clearer by citing an example. In May of last year – May the 5th in fact – I went to bed after a row with my father and, riled as I was by both the nature of the fight and its implications for my future, I found myself incapable of turning my thoughts off for sleep, and after several attempts of getting up again, brushing my teeth, going back to bed, and attempting to fool myself into slumber, it wasn't until dawn that I finally turned my thoughts off for good and it wasn't until 11.11 am that I eventually woke up on the following day.
Now, I have read somewhere that 11.11 is thought to be the most commonly viewed time of the day, (presuming a digital clock and not an analogue), and although this universally held dictum is not verifiable, rather a delusion caused by the heightened awareness of either four identical numbers in a row or (what we will come to later and what I will refer now to as) Remembrance Time, those four numbers on that particular day in May held a special significance for me, a significance that goes beyond the alleged hyperphysical happenstance of the above, for after reading 11.11 off the clock, 11.11 being, as I pointed out just a moment ago, Remembrance Time, the exact time that the Armistice was signed in 1918 in a train near Compiègne, I too was able to reach an armistice with my father – {‘Armistice’ being ‘a temporary suspension of hostilities between two warring parties’} – resulting in the cessation of a conflict that I thought was liable to drag on for days, if not weeks, because as my father says, when confronted with what he terms the ‘pure bloody-mindedness’ of my position, ‘you just can't let it go, can you?’ a phrase that he will often use on repeat, thus exposing himself to charges of the exact same accusation that he has levelled towards me, a charge that, whilst not necessarily discrediting his previous evaluation, nevertheless equates him with the same kind of hypocrisy he likes to lambast every night on TV.
Now, although I have never measured this particular phenomenon in an empirical or recognised way, I would go as far as to say that I have woken up to the sound of my alarm on at least 90% of the occasions that I have deliberately fallen asleep (and I say deliberately, because there are occasions when I fall asleep by accident on the couch). That said, for the sake of clarification and to assuage any fears that I have in some way started to generalise about my life as a whole, I should add that this figure, this 90% of all occasions, need apply only to the most recent period of my life (ie. the last two and a half years), for it's only in this time that responsibility for my waking has passed from that of my father (an obligation he endured until the day I turned eighteen) to the person who, if recent studies are to be believed, is the best person to be making such calls (ie. me).
I say this last comment because it is now received wisdom (ie. current generational thinking and likely to change in the next ten or so years) that teenagers require more sleep than adults and that the sleep that they require should be taken at different times of the day to what most adults perceive as being normal. So when, say, I should have been going to bed at midnight (between the ages of twelve and nineteen) and waking up around ten, I was in fact going to bed long before midnight and waking up before eight. The result of this was what received wisdom would once have termed insomnia (or an inability to sleep), but what, in light of the aforementioned studies, would more accurately be described as conventional hooey, a conviction brought on by the same non-empirical, non-responsive observations that old wives used to refer to when constructing their pithy enunciations of the past. And it is for this very reason that I try to set my alarm, without fail, before going to bed because I am turning twenty-one very soon and twenty-one is largely regarded, (and again this refers back to the received wisdom upon which I have touched), as the age where one must start reducing one's hours of sleep from an average of ten to an average of eight and, although one cannot apply the same set of rules to every single person who's currently living on this earth, it is still a good yardstick upon which we can judge our own sleeping patterns and amend / modify / re-evaluate depending on how we feel. And therefore, now that I am aware of this future target of eight, I am in the process of reducing my hours of sleep from an average of ten, getting on for near ten and a half, to approximately nine, with a target of eight by the end of the year, and it is for this reason, although there are other less superior reasons (the details of which I will go into very soon), that setting my alarm has become such an important part of my routine, an activity that takes place at least nine out of ten times before going to bed.
In fact, it is now such an entrenched part of my routine (step three in a ten-step routine, the first step being to stretch real slow and the last step being to turn off my bedside lamp with both my left thumb and my right thumb pressing down), that it would be inconceivable to imagine not setting my alarm and I'd say that, given a time period of the last six or seven months, I have probably set my alarm on at least 99% of all occasions, and I would even guess at a hundred were it not for the conceit that's implied in such a boast. My routine is, and I do not think it an exaggeration or a misinterpretation to suggest, the reason why I can now fall asleep in a time that, according to Psy-ence magazine, is quicker than the national average for all years between 2001 and 2010, the national average hovering between six minutes and nine (from the moment you turn your light off to the moment you fall asleep), whereas my average tends to keep below five, this from someone who used to spend three or four hours wrestling with their pillow before finally, around three or around four in the morning, submitting to the biological imperative we call sleep. And I'd say that there are a couple of reasons for why the routine appears to work and one of the main reasons would be that it calms me down, forcing me to concentrate in quite a measured and dispassionate way, in the same way that people suggest counting sheep in the dark or learning something new but banal, and it would appear to be a mix of focus, familiarity and boredom that create the most necessary and most convenient circumstances for sleep to be a natural progression rather than an unattainable goal. Does that make sense? And I'd also say that my routine, as long as all steps are taken in the correct order, works as a confidence trick as well because, although I call it my ten-step routine, it is really my eleven-step routine, as step number eleven, without fail, is to fall asleep within five minutes of the enacting of step ten, and so as long as I do step one and step two and then three and then four and as long as I do every single step without changing or reducing the order, then it follows that, through what we now have come to term positive reinforcement, (or, in this case, a behaviour that's reinforced), I will fall asleep after step ten has been completed.
And it's through these ten steps, or eleven, that I have learnt how to manage my sleep and become a much calmer person as a result. And as I have explained to my father on several occasions, if he was to follow the ten-step routine then he too would sleep soundly at night instead of grinding his teeth and getting up every two or three hours for a smoke (to steady the nerves, so he says, although it's received wisdom nowadays that the intake of nicotine actually increases anxiety leading to disorders such as agoraphobia later in life, and it's my considered opinion, an opinion that was shared by the doctor who came and treated him on that one occasion when the attack was so bad that, in the words of the treating doctor, it was just about the worst panic attack he had ever seen, that the instances of anxiety from which my father suffers could be dramatically, and unreservedly, reduced by both the amount of caffeine he ingests and the amount of nicotine he inhales). My father, though, has become, in the words of my counsellor, somewhat inured to my comments and it is rare that he responds with anything additional to “yeah” or “I'll be back by the time you've gone to sleep,” and although I tell him about the importance of step three, the setting of one's alarm, and although I suggest to him that it's step three above all else which appears to guarantee one a reasonable sleep, whether it's through the implicit acknowledgement that by setting one's alarm one is presuming sleep at some point in the intervening hours, or whether it's through the swathe of instant tiredness that appears to strike one upon calculating the time that exists between now and for when the alarm is actually set, it is still not uncommon for my father to sleep through to the evening and live in ignorance, for often days at a time, as to whether the sun is still rising and setting and whether the birds still sing their song in the sky.
And so on the days when I wake up before my alarm, which are rare, or on the days when I don't set an alarm, which are even rarer, I pay special attention to the digital clock that sits on the table by the lamp and the glass of water and the box of tissues that also reside on the table, within reaching distance should I require them during the night, and after adjusting my eyes to the bright orange LEDs on the special black and white chessboard design of the clock, I read off the time and make the decision that a). the three or four numbers spell out a message that is precise, unambiguous and direct, or b). the message is hidden and will most likely be unveiled during the course of the day. And in the case of a), I will wait exactly ten minutes (for it is received wisdom that one should never make a decision within the first ten minutes that one is awake because one is still neurologically asleep at this point, for want of a better word, because one's powers of reason, in addition to one's resource pool of information, all require warming up before reaching their peak) and after the ten minutes is finally up, I can then make a decision as to whether my intended activities for that day should be allowed to proceed either i). as per normal, or ii). with due caution, or whether, on the other hand, they should be cancelled altogether, the latter action having been taken on only the one occasion, incidentally the very first time I had chosen to adopt this particular method of time-centred quasicryptoanalysis, and the details of that episode I will most likely go into later on because it's an episode I can now speak of rather than an episode that requires cellar time or maturation, a phrase that my counsellor used and one that my father refers to as shrink talk or doublespeak.
In the case of b), though, I will simply go about my day as per normal and I will use the methods of hindsight / advanced information / external stimuli / continuous reasoning to at some point unlock and decipher the message so that, although there may be little short-term benefit to the unveiling of the clue, I will still be able to use this heightened knowledge to better increase my chances of an advanced diagnosis in the future, much like how people learn cryptic crosswords by studying the answers and working backwards until, eventually, once fully stocked with the tools, they are able to solve the cryptic clues on their own. And I can give you an example of option b), what I for the moment will term a retrospective diagnosis, because it occurred in September of last year when the time spelt out 8.18, or BIB, and it was only during dinner, when I spilt tomato ketchup down the front of my shirt, that I understood what 8.18 was really trying to say.
9.11, however, that was the most egregious example of self-empowering self-deception that my counsellor had ever heard, but I don't think I will discuss this with him again and on the many occasions since then that he's brought it up I have simply turned my head ninety degrees and affected a look of calculated indifference which my counsellor calls non-participation and I think it's only now that he's beginning to realise that this so-called non-participation can be maintained for an indefinite amount of time and that if he ever saw 9.11 on his clock within seconds of waking up then he too would be worried about what events may happen to transpire during that day and that if he too decided to stay in bed as a method of countering the inevitable flow only to receive a phone call from his father summoning him immediately to the hospital with the worst, yes the worst – the worst possible news that I had never ever imagined hearing in my life – then he too would connect the time on the clock with the so-called tragic tragic events of that day and if I ever wanted to blame myself for those events, events that were beyond my control, as my counsellor so assuredly says, then surely I would have found a more direct link between me and what happened, for instance that she was crossing the road to buy a birthday cake for me, that she was in her own little world because she was thinking about me, that she was thinking about me and my seventeenth birthday, that she was thinking about me and that she was shopping for me and that it was my birthday and that it was my cake she was about to buy, and so surely making a connection between 9.11 and what happened is not, as my counsellor says, asking a friend to come and join me in the blame game, because it's simply a connection, a simple sign, a message I can't ignore, and if I was, as I said before, intent on finding blame then there it is, all nice and clear, she was doing things for me when the events took their course, she was looking out for me. As simple as that. And although before I could never think of mother before going to bed because it would awake the inner demons in my mind it is possible now, three and a half years later, to think of her when I'm lying in bed and in fact it's a source of great comfort and in particular I like to think of the nanny naps she used to have during the middle of the day (despite the fact that she was never a gran) and how she would often sit in front of the TV at about 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon and she would allow herself slowly to fall asleep and I told her that it was bad practice because one should always fight the onset of sleep during the day in case one ever found oneself injured or in a serious condition and the doctor says whatever you do, you must stay awake because if you fall asleep then you will never wake up again and I knew that this sometimes happens because I had seen it on TV several times and I'm clever enough to differentiate between what on TV reflects reality and what instead requires a suspension of belief and my mother always used to counter this by talking about circadian rhythms and that most living organisms respond to a 24-hour biochemical cycle and that this 24-hour cycle involves natural rest times around one to two o'clock in the morning and one to two o'clock during the day and that by having a nanny nap during the day she was simply responding to the natural biochemistry of her body and that it made her no less susceptible to falling asleep in other situations and my counsellor has explained this to me several times and I understand it now and I don't blame it for the events of that day and besides she died instantly my dad kept saying over and over interspersed with just let it go son just let it go son just let it go and having to hear that all the time – just let it go – and having to hear the same clichés, the same platitudes, the same words – she died instantly she died instantly – they were simply not the words I wanted to hear and yet everyone kept saying this was a good thing and how thankful they were that it happened and yet those two sentences together just let it go son and she died instantly are just about the two least appropriate sources of what I needed right then, consolation, and yet that's what people kept saying, that at least I could be consoled by the fact that she died instantly and I know that if it was me in that situation and so many times I've imagined it was then yes I would have liked just a moment, a tiny moment, a very small microscopic moment in which I was aware of what was happening, where in fact I did know what had hit me and yes it was good to have this small fleeting wave of recognition because isn't it good to get closure mister counsellor, isn't that what you keep telling me, get closure get closure get closure get closure and yet by your reckoning my mother never received this supposed closure because yes as my father says and yes as you say and yes as everyone else seems to say when I see them she died instantly she died instantly she died instantly she died instantly and yet surely if there's ever a time for so-called closure then it's then, at the moment of death, because imagine a world in which death was disappearance, in which yes instead of dying in the ways we know now, you just vanished, disappeared, that one minute you were there and then the next you were gone, just imagine it just imagine for a second, because who would want to live in a world where any minute, just like that, you were gone, (pop!), where the person you were talking to, your mother, your father, your brother, were one minute there and then the next minute, (pop!), they were gone and you knew that never again would you be able to see them again and it was up to Aunty Jean and not you to explain to me what had really happened, that's right, Aunty Jean, is she a counsellor? is she a psychologist? is she being paid? no, no and thrice no, and yet she was the one who could tell me what had really happened because she was the one who said that all humans, that's right all humans, every single person who has ever lived on this earth, achieves closure, or, should I say, will achieve closure when they die, because they don't die instantly, in fact no one dies instantly without any idea that they're dead, even if they die like my mother did, ever so suddenly, swept off her feet in the words of Uncle Ron, Ron who was talking to my father at the funeral, Ron who said in an attempt at humour for which he has not yet been forgiven, at least not by dad, she hadn't been swept off her feet like that since the first time you both met, and thanks to Aunty Jean, I now know that my mother received closure in that moment, that microscopic moment, because this is what happens, she told me, and I listened and I listened hard because I knew that Jean happened to know about these things because I knew that she had spoken to her mother, her mother who is no longer alive, speaking to her from the grave because of the powers she can summon when she prays, and this is what Jean told me that day, this is what she said: it's like sleep, because sleep is such a lovely thing, and you know how people write sleep as a series of ZZZZZs, well it's like that, isn't it Dennis? it's like a series of Zs, only it's shorter and more poignant and more ???, it's like a Z, just a Z, just like if birth was an A and your life was B to Y then death is just Z, and there's nothing coming next, and just like when you're going to sleep you seem to know you're going to sleep, and you feel glad, and you feel tired, but no one ever knows the exact point, the precise point when they start to sleep and it's just like that, the way that humans die, and it would have been just like that for your mum, it would have been just like falling asleep but in the timeframe of a micromicrosecond.
Z. I say to my counsellor over and over. Z. I shout to my dad from upstairs. So, it is true then that my mother would have had a moment of peace and acceptance and I say to all those people who say ‘she died instantly she died instantly she died instantly’, well if that's what you want then so be it, you can die instantly when the time comes for you to go, but me, my mother and Aunty Jean, we will all have this moment of acceptance, no matter how quick it might be, and we will pass into death at least contented by our own knowledge of what is taking place.
1.46 it is then, or just gone a quarter to two in the morning, and this is the first time for a while I've woken up before my alarm and I'm trying to decipher the message but all I can think of is AD146 when Carthage was destroyed by the Romans, but what does that mean and what does it all mean and I guess I would know if father was home because I would hear him, I would hear him grinding his teeth and moving his bed clothes from the one side of the bed to the next and I remember him saying that back when she was alive, when my mother and him were both together, not that they were ever separated or divorced during their time, but they would often have moments apart, due to work, sometimes weeks, sometimes days, and during those times they spent apart my father would say that he enjoyed that first week whereas mother found it hard but after week two and week three my father would begin to pine whereas for my mother would get stronger every day and a similar thing has seemed to happened to us since mother's death, because my father, who was such a pillar of strength at the start, my father who Aunty Jean thought was a little too emotionless about the whole thing straight away, my father who, during the time I couldn't sleep, whilst I was almost mute and couldn't find the words to express my exasperation, devoted himself solely to my benefit, staying with me whilst I tried to sleep, stroking my hair and whispering these unintelligible stories in a soporific tone, and yet my father is now, three and a half years later, three and a half years after the tragic event, going through the exact same process of grief that I was at the start and that is why I want to be there for him too, that is why I want to help him, put him on to the ten-step routine, because he was there for me when I needed him the most and he's a good man and he's a good father and what does it mean by the destruction of Carthage, why does it say 1.46 and why's he not home, drinking and smoking, because that's what he'll be doing, drinking and smoking, I should have warned her, I should have warned her, I should have warned her to pay attention on that day.
Dave Witty is a new writer who's recently relocated from London to outback Australia. He is 6 foot 2 inches tall. His girlfriend is 5 foot 11. So far, Dave has had stories published in the Truth magazine, the Victory Papers, and Secret Attic. His ambition is to complete the neverending novel. He's getting closer every day.