The Night-Shift Editor of My Skull
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Nobody died this morning. I checked. Lying in my small room in Calcutta, heart playing tabla against the ribs, I took the census: one ceiling, present and indifferent; one fan, turning like a bored deity who has seen this exact worship before; one debtor, alive, which is more than can be said for the man I was twenty minutes ago, who had apparently lost everything in a fire that never happened, in a city that never existed, to a bank that never lent him a single paisa. Two bankruptcies in one night, and only one of them real. By the standards of my sleeping brain, that counts as a recovery.
The word nightmare is a swindle, and I mean that as a compliment to swindles. The mare that squats on my chest at three in the morning is not a horse. The old Germanic mare was a goblin, incubus, night-creature, one of those enterprising supernatural bastards our ancestors employed before neurologists arrived with electrodes. The female horse is a different mare entirely. The words did not merge; modern English merely dressed two unrelated relatives in the same coat and left us to assume they had married. The old nightmare was the creature itself, or the suffocating oppression it brought; only much later did the word widen into the modern bad dream. So when I say I have nightmares, I mean the dreams, but I reserve affection for the goblin. The goblin pays no rent. The goblin has tenure. I am not, as a piece of sleeping real estate, what you would call low-maintenance, and still the goblin has tenure.
And he has an editor. Somewhere between midnight and the armpit of the night, a night-shift editor clocks in inside my skull, unpaid, unshaven, nursing a grudge the size of the Hooghly, and sets about splicing my old failures with my dead ends, my humiliations with my unfinished business, my unpaid necessities with catastrophes I have not even had the foresight to invent while awake. He sits on my failures and on my patience. No monsters, no corridors, no courtesy: the editor does not deal in cinema, he deals in documentary, dense ugly seamless things in which memory, prediction, and pure unfiltered nonsense share one green room and one wardrobe, and the wardrobe is on fire. What is a nightmare but a loan taken out against a bank that does not exist, with the interest compounded hourly in the currency of the heart? I would sooner extract a refund from the landlord of my own skull than get this man to issue a correction. By day I doubt; by night I believe. The sleeping brain believes what the waking brain would prosecute for insufficient evidence, and the waking brain pays for what the sleeping brain believed: the reader, poor fool, trusts the writer, and the writer, poorer fool, trusts the ink.
The wonder of it, and there is a wonder here though it arrives smeared in the colonic commentary of the whole affair, is that this is biology. Chemistry, electricity, anatomy, memory, emotion, all conspiring without minutes being taken. There is no demon required; there is roughly three pounds of electrified porridge that has decided, without consulting the management, to run a cinema at a loss. During REM sleep, neurons in the noradrenergic locus coeruleus and serotonergic raphe nuclei fall almost silent, while cholinergic systems that help keep the cortex activated become comparatively busy. The chemistry of ordinary vigilance changes shift. The old animal literature gave us PGO waves—ponto-geniculo-occipital bursts racing from the pons through visual machinery—and human imaging has found activity consistent with related pontine-thalamic-occipital events, though our skulls have proved less obliging than cats about letting scientists nail the whole mechanism to the wall. The cortex receives internally generated traffic while the outside world is largely shuttered and does what cortex has spent its whole evolutionary career doing: tries to make the traffic mean something.
It takes static and makes statute. It takes noise and makes narrative.
Hobson and McCarley called one influential version of this activation-synthesis in 1977: the forebrain trying to synthesize internally generated activation into a dream. Science-speak, in my preferred translation, for the brain voiding alphabet soup and attempting literature. It was a magnificent idea and not the final word. Dreams are not exclusive to REM; they occur in non-REM sleep too, and later work has made the old picture of a brainstem projector and a helpless cortical screen considerably messier. Good. Nature, unlike PowerPoint, is under no obligation to fit on one slide.
Hobson later compared dreaming not exactly to ordinary psychosis but to delirium: hallucination-like imagery, disorientation, confabulation, rotten memory, the whole neurological municipal strike. Every night I enter a jurisdiction in which evidence law has been suspended and every morning I am discharged without so much as a pamphlet. Meanwhile the executive portions of the prefrontal cortex—the fact-checkers, the little men with green eyeshades who ask for sources—are relatively subdued rather than literally switched off, while limbic and paralimbic regions, including the amygdala, can become conspicuously active. Some medial prefrontal territory remains very much in business; the brain is irritatingly complicated even when unconscious. But enough of the machinery of skepticism goes quiet that an impossible dead uncle driving a tram through Saturn may be accepted without cross-examination. The organ that by day demands evidence becomes, by night, the aunt who forwards everything on WhatsApp. I own a machine that manufactures certainty out of gibberish and sells it back to me at full price. No wonder I am poor.
The fat textbooks will not tell you this part. Or rather, they will, but they will hide it behind polysyllables with the confidence of undertakers arranging flowers: pedunculopontine tegmentum, ponto-geniculo-occipital, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as if a sufficiently long word could put a lid on astonishment. But behind each unpronounceable mouthful stands a man fumbling.
REM sleep entered modern science through exactly this kind of fumbling. Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student in Nathaniel Kleitman’s laboratory at the University of Chicago, had been studying eye movements in sleeping infants. In 1951 he rigged an old recording machine to measure eye movements during sleep and used his eight-year-old son, Armond, as an early subject. The ink pens suddenly began drawing bursts of jerky eye movement across the paper. Kleitman was skeptical, as any respectable scientist ought to be when the machine appears to announce a new state of consciousness, so they checked, expanded the observations to adults, woke people during these strange periods and found dream reports associated with them. In 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman published the paper that helped open modern REM research. Not quite a father merely staring at fluttering eyelids until a science fell out, which is prettier but false. Better: a graduate student, his sleeping son, an old machine, some violently scribbling pens, a skeptical supervisor, and the stubborn refusal to assume the apparatus was drunk. That is how science actually looks before history irons its shirt.
Crick, yes, that Crick, the double-helix Crick, later proposed with Graeme Mitchison in 1983 that REM sleep might perform a kind of reverse learning, weakening certain undesirable patterns of interaction in cortical networks. Not quite the brain’s municipal garbage truck hauling away yesterday’s embarrassing memories; the proposal was more specific, stranger, and more mathematical than that. They were worried about pathological attractors and parasitic modes in associative neural networks, patterns that could reinforce themselves until the machinery clogged with its own echoes. Dream sleep, they suggested, might weaken those patterns.
My brain, I regret to report, has rejected the contract.
My brain does not take out the trash. My brain rearranges the trash on the bed, lights it theatrically from below, hires Bengali repertory actors, and reads the inventory to me in a dramatic whisper, and then has the audacity to charge me sleep for the privilege.
Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, called dreams the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious and placed wish-fulfillment near the center of his theory, which is the stone I turn over at three in the morning with something squirming underneath: if these are wishes, then somewhere in me dwells a wish to be stripped, flogged, bankrupt, abandoned, arrested for a crime committed by a cousin who does not exist, and exhibited in the town square of a city with no exits, a wish my superego, that constipated little constable, is only too happy to grant and to invoice.
And here another correction must be made before the goblins sue. The ancient chest-squatting demon, Newfoundland’s Old Hag, the German Alpdrücken and their various cousins belong more closely to the territory we now call sleep paralysis than to the ordinary nightmare: consciousness returning while REM-related muscle paralysis has not quite released its grip, sometimes accompanied by a sensed presence, pressure on the chest, terror, hallucination. Nightmare and sleep paralysis are not the same thing, even if folklore and language have spent centuries allowing them to drink at the same bar. Newfoundland called one version the Old Hag. German speakers had the Alp, the oppressive night-creature, and Alpdrücken, the pressing of the Alp. Bengal has its own crowded supernatural civil service and never lacked explanations for what sat on whom at night.
The remarkable thing is not that every culture invented exactly the same goblin—they did not—but that cultures separated by oceans repeatedly tried to explain a cluster of terrifying nocturnal experiences by putting an agent in the room. Something is pressing me. Someone is here. Something wants me dead. Before polysomnography, that is not an idiotic inference. You wake, you cannot move, there is a weight on your chest and a presence beside the bed. Try explaining REM atonia to yourself while a hag is sitting on your sternum.
Science did not kill the demon. Science separated several demons that folklore had bundled into one sack, gave each a differential diagnosis, attached electrodes to the sack, and published the results.
The demon, being a demon, survived peer review.
This is why this corner of the blog is called raw: because the textbook hands you the polysyllable and hides the fumbling, and the fumbling is the human part, the graduate student with the old machine, the son on the cot, the ink pens going mad across the page, the moment before anybody knows whether the machine is broken or the universe has just admitted another secret.
And yet, and here the essay must swallow its own gall like medicine, waking has become one of the few reliable mercies left on my ledger. This is absurd on its face. I wake to a small room, an empty wallet’s echo, an uncertain future, unfinished work, unpaid necessities, and the same mind that went to sleep with me the night before, unchanged, unrepentant, still bipolar in the manner of a ceiling fan whose regulator was wired by a drunk electrician and then certified by the municipality. There is no yacht outside. There is no Swiss breakfast. There is no secretary announcing that the financial crisis resolved itself during REM. Reality is still reality, that cheapskate, that flat-footed, flat-ceilinged saint.
But for the first few seconds after a particularly vicious dream, poverty can feel almost reassuring.
Gone, gone: the fire, the city, the bank, the corpse of me that never was.
The debts are real. The loneliness is real. The uncertainty is real.
The fire was not.
Nobody died.
I did not lose what I never possessed, a fine distinction my sleeping brain cannot make, since it is, after all, the same brain that once believed a lottery ticket was a retirement plan. The room is still there. The ceiling, that flat white Brahmin, unblinking, indifferent, granting absolution to no one in particular, holds. The fan turns. The fan turns. The fan has turned through worse regimes than this one.
There is an arithmetic to it, and I have spent fifteen years around healthcare data and research, which is to say fifteen years learning that the body is a rumor the organs tell each other, so trust me with the arithmetic. Morning comfort is a difference, not a sum:
where , and yet , because is the deeper negative, the Mariana Trench of negatives, and by the simple miracle of subtraction, the same miracle by which governments announce growth, two wrongs briefly make a right.
Misery has gradients. The nervous system keeps a private ledger, and in that ledger despair is denominated relative to whatever the night printed, so that ordinary despair, unbearable at noon, is promoted at dawn into the category of safety, and poverty itself, actual, unglamorous, rice-and-dal poverty, puts on the ermine of luxury and sits, however briefly, on the throne of the survivable.
The Katha Upanishad says:
उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत
Arise. Awake. Approach those who know, and learn.
And then, because the Upanishads were apparently not written by motivational speakers selling airport books, it immediately warns that the path is like the edge of a razor, difficult to cross, difficult to travel.
No yacht in the verse. No Swiss breakfast. No guarantee that arising will improve the balance sheet. Just arise, awake, learn, mind the razor.
On the mornings after the goblin’s visit, I can work with that.
And when the Bhagavad Gita begins its rebuke to Arjuna with अशोच्यानन्वशोचस्त्वं—you grieve for those who should not be grieved for—I know I am committing a magnificent act of textual theft by applying Kurukshetra to the municipal theatre inside my sleeping skull, but theft is one of literature’s renewable resources. I know precisely which corpses I mean: the ones the night-shift editor laid out so artfully across my four a.m., the invented dead, the impossible cities, the fires with no ash. Fine. Let the morning keep its own griefs; at least those are mine, signed and stamped, real as rent.
So I lie there for a few moments and enjoy the ridiculous luxury of reality, the only luxury my account still clears. The editor is off-shift by now, drinking somewhere in the folds of the cerebrum, sharpening tomorrow’s edition against the whetstone of my unquiet liver. Let him.
The ceiling holds.
Nobody died.
I have debts to verify, a life, such as it is, to re-inflate slowly like a punctured football in a monsoon gutter, and a goblin on my chest who, I have checked twice, three times, was never a horse.
Poor in the morning, poor at noon, poor at night: but poor in my own bed, in my own city, under my own ceiling, and for the length of one fan-turned breath, that is enough.
It has to be.
It is.
P.S. References:
Aserinsky, E. and Kleitman, N., “Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, during Sleep,” Science, 1953.
Crick, F. and Mitchison, G., “The Function of Dream Sleep,” Nature, 1983.
Hobson, J. A. and McCarley, R. W., “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1977.
Hobson, J. A., “Dreaming as Delirium: A Mental Status Analysis of Our Nightly Madness,” Seminars in Neurology, 1997.
Maquet, P. et al., “Functional Neuroanatomy of Human Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep and Dreaming,” Nature, 1996.
Siclari, F. et al., “The Neural Correlates of Dreaming,” Nature Neuroscience, 2017.
Ness, R. C., “The Old Hag Phenomenon as Sleep Paralysis: A Biocultural Interpretation,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1978.
Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900.
Katha Upanishad, 1.3.14.
Bhagavad Gita, 2.11.
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