For a few years now, I’ve had the end of Friends At The Table’s fourth season (Twilight Mirage) bouncing around in my head. Not the way the story played out, though I’ve thought of that plenty, but the very end of it. As the season wraps up and the last bits of the game they played slowly fade out, the final theme starts to play over what turns out to be one of the characters from the season interviewing his allies. He cycles through a bunch of questions and the person answering them usually changes from one question to the next with very little repetition, with one notable exception. This final question lends itself to the name of the song that’s playing as the season winds down and the various characters answer questions posed by the interviewer, and is what has stuck in my mind for so very long. The interviewer asks the crew if they prefer falling asleep or waking up. Everyone answers with their own thoughts on the matter, providing information about not just their answer but also their view about the world and the part they have to play in it, because they’re not just answering the question but speaking about why they prefer their given option. The way this question and series of answers are framed makes it clear that one answer isn’t “correct” or that one mode of thinking isn’t preferable to another. Instead, it leaves you, the listener, to consider their words and reflect on how these interviews, which ostensibly occurred at the halfway point of the season rather than the end of it, might change or alter how you feel about these characters and the events you’ve been listening to for some thirty-ish episodes. It’s really well done and has stuck with me as much as anything Friends at the Table has done (and that’s genuinely a lot).

In the years since I first this season-closer and thought about these questions, this particular question has stuck out to me for all the reasons I’ve given above but also because I’m an insomniac. At most charitable, you could say that I have a difficult relationship with sleep. More honestly, you could probably say that I have a somewhat toxic relationship with it. If I could go without sleep, I would. I don’t particularly enjoy it since I’ve felt the difficulties of its absence so keenly that I can’t help but associate the entire thing with a deficiency I feel in myself. To me, sleep is a thing that I’m forced to do that I still often fail to actually do well, despite how much time and effort I’ve put into being good at it. Heck, even being asleep doesn’t mean much for me because I hardly ever remember my dreams, so all but the tiniest fraction of my experiences with it are a simple jump in time. I don’t particularly enjoy waking up, either, because so often I wake up just as tired and out-of-sorts as I went to sleep, and that’s even without factoring into how disrupted my sleep has been over the last year and how I spent so much of that year waking up not only as tired as I was when I went to sleep, but usually more sore and uncomfortable, too. With all that in mind, if I was posed this question, how would I answer? It’s a question of preference, and, since the question isn’t literally about the act of falling asleep or waking up but about how everyone feels and thinks about those things, surely I could answer it.

But no. I’ve been thinking for a few years about which I prefer (in the specific context of this question) and I don’t much care for either one. For me, falling asleep is as much about trying to find ways to do it accidentally as it is about being tired or wanting to rest. Waking up is a disruption to the little rest I’m finally getting and a return to the problems I shut out of my thinking mind the night before. Neither holds much interest or promise for me. Instead, if I were to be asked the question, I’d probably say “staying up.” After all, as much as I don’t like going to sleep, I know I need to. I still go to bed at a reasonable time (or at least try to), so staying up more than usual still has a special meaning to me. Usually there’s something going on, like trying to wrap up some writing I’m doing or finish a thing in a video game or because I’m busy watching something that has caught my attention. I never stay up that late needlessly (well, we could probably have a pretty long talk about what constitutes “needlessly” but that’s beside the point), so any time I’m staying up means that I’m caught up doing something that has captured my attention, my passion, or both. It means I’m engaged and interested in something, that I’m making a deliberate choice to trade a resource I need (sleep) for one that I can never get enough of (fulfillment). Yes, falling asleep after a long day can feel nice, as can waking up the morning of a day you’ve been looking forward to. Finally laying your burdens to rest as you go to sleep and feeling recharged and ready for the day’s labor can both be rewarding experiences. But neither will ever feel as good to me as looking at the clock and making the conscious decision that, this time at least, I’m choosing to stay up late for myself rather because my mind just won’t quiet down enough for me to fall asleep.

I wish there was something I could to change this. I recognize that repairing my relationship with sleep would probably go a long way toward actually being able to sleep better since it would help dispense with the whisper of anxiety I feel every time I lay down that this might be another one of those times that I just can’t fall for no clear reason. Because my muscles twitch right as I’m about to fall asleep. Because the tiredness that I’ve been fighting all day has suddenly fled. Because my mind won’t stop racing or my heart won’t stop hammering. Or just because, for whatever reason, sleep is eluding me and not even turning around to face the other side of the room will help relieve the feeling of restlessness (literal) that won’t leave me alone. If I could just do that, I would probably at least have a better time falling asleep and could pick that as my answer instead since, conceptually at least, that’s what I’d pick if I had better luck falling asleep. Who wouldn’t want to be able to lazily consider the day’s events, the stories you’ve heard or experienced lately, and idly let your mind wander over what tomorrow might bring as your eyes grow heavy, your focus slips away, and everything fades into sweet, relief-inducing nothingness? That sounds like bliss to me.