Timelessness

It’s 2 a.m. and I’m still awake. Wide awake. It’s been like this for a while. Nearly two years now. Time is my enemy. All night I read, I write, I watch movies and keep glancing at my watch at regular intervals watching the time tick past ever so slowly. I wait for the hour hand to strike four.  When it does, I shut down my laptop, close all books on my desk neatly bookmarking them, draw the drapes, flick off the lights and slide under covers. Then I set the alarm. 7.30 a.m. The first lecture commences at 8 a.m. every weekday. I say a bed-time prayer and promise myself that from the next night on I would sleep early, knowing fully well that that’s almost impossible for me now. I have lost weight, have dark shadows under my eyes and have started smoking to keep away the headaches. Waking up in the morning is an arduous task with my sleepy self arguing with my Voice of Reason to let go of the lectures and sleep some more. Just a little more. Just a few hours. Please. Every morning is a battle. Sometimes the sleepy self wins, sometimes the battle is won by the Voice of Reason. But no matter which of them wins, I always lose. I pull the covers off and stagger across the room locating my clothes, sometimes unwashed and crumpled and sometimes completely mismatched. Like I care. Despite sleep-deprivation, my brain stays alert throughout the day, attending lectures, researching and taking notes. I have adapted well.

 

It all started one nothing-out-of-the-ordinary night. I was watching a movie wherein the Attorney who’s handling a complicated murder case is awoken every morning at precisely 3 a.m. by things going wrong in the house, like lights switching themselves on or the fire alarm going off without any smoke. This was later explained in the movie to be based on the premise that 3 a.m. is the anti-Christ hour. Some believe that Christ was crucified at 3 p.m., and so the Old Nick mocks at Him by coming to full-blown power at 3 a.m. What crass! I thought. I never thought about the movie after that night and everything was normal. Until one morning I started from sleep at a dark hour. I checked my watch out of habit and 3 a.m. it was. I found it eery but went back to sleep. Next night, the same routine followed. And the night after that. And every night after that until I gave up on going to bed early because I was completely creeped out.

It is highly psychological, and it only happens because somehow the events of that movie registered themselves in my subconscious brain which is active while I sleep. We know that our bodies are so tuned in to the practice of scheduling even our little tasks by the hours on the clock that they know what time it is at any given hour, though not consciously. It happens a lot of times that we wake up by ourselves just a minute before our alarm beeps. Ever thought how that works? Because our subconscious brain knows it all! He is one smart chap and outsmarts all our efforts to control it. My point is, the fact that I can’t sleep until 4 a.m. is because no matter how hard I try to pull it off, I have an even harder time trying to keep my subconscious brain from waking me up at that odd hour by its own in-built alarm. And so, my own brain and time are my biggest enemies.

Sometimes I wonder, what if there were no clocks? No clearly demarcated and numbered hours? What if my subconscious brain could never tell what exact hour it was except daybreak and nightfall? I want to live in a state of complete and total timelessness, as I like to call it. No clocks. No buzzers. I want to get up when the first ray of the dawn wards off the darkness and go to bed when the moon is higher up in the sky. In the meantime, I want to read. Books, computer print-outs and old diaries and newspaper clippings. Books on history, religion, philosophy, art, literature, music, science, math, fiction…You name it! I want to put on my running shoes and go running across the farms, past the lake, along the trails in the woods, then sit down on a boulder, wipe the sweat off my brow and listen to myself breathe along the steady hum of the crickets and an occasional call of a bird in its flight. I want to quit smoking and start eating right. Build up my appetite. If only I could devote some months of my life to a state of timelessness until my dear subconscious brain feels so full of little everyday pleasures and works of Michelangelo, Bob Marley, Arundhati Roy, Khaled Hussaini, Rumi, Richard Bach and Dostoevsky, that it could no longer remember 3 a.m. 

It’ll have to wait though. I cannot afford the luxury of timelessness just yet. Final year at college has some price to pay. But someday, why not? 

A piece of advice to my perceptive reader- chose wisely what you read or see on screen. Have a good night!!