Deep Night, But I Can't Sleep

Although Zhang Henshui also has a novel called Deep Night, what I want to talk about is sleep, unrelated to that novel.

Since April, no matter what I do or think, my reactions have been extremely slow—like an ordinary computer suddenly running too many programs, where you can move the mouse but clicking anything doesn’t respond to right-click. Also, some things in life drew the worst lot for me; everything goes wrong. Compared to others it’s no different, but my own feeling is particularly unpleasant. We’re all in the same trough eating pig feed; a maverick pig suddenly can’t understand why it has to root around in this trough every day, so it wants to fly out of the pen to take a look, but unfortunately it has no wings. Once that rare spark of thought is extinguished, it becomes even more dejected.

I started paying attention to my sleep issues. The main reason for being half a beat slow is that my sleep has been castrated by practicing the Sunflower Manual, wasting a lot of time.

Basically since second year of junior high, my sleep is no longer as deep as before. I start overthinking about the surrounding world—for example, what the houses around me should look like, where the highway at the school gate should lead, and so on. Probably haven’t thought about topics related to “women, women…” yet. These wandering thoughts often keep me tossing and turning in bed past midnight. Some people in similar situations have even cried because of it. I haven’t, but it must be very painful. Once I even went to a small clinic and told the doctor I couldn’t sleep at night—he actually didn’t prescribe me sleeping pills. Now of course I’m glad that doctor didn’t give me sleeping pills back then; otherwise I might need medication to maintain sleep now, or I might have already swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills over something I couldn’t figure out. Naturally, dear reader, you wouldn’t see these rambling, worthless things I’m writing in a frenzy, out of boredom, with passion on office software.

Perhaps I’m already exhausted, but I’ve never practiced going to bed early. No matter how sleepy I am during the day, how my eyelids are fighting, I just don’t want to sleep too early. Before midnight I’m usually online; when not online, I’m playing on my phone. During this pre-sleep time, I’ve added a lot of content to my read-novels list. If a novel is exciting, I often slowly go to sleep at one or two in the morning. When there’s no novel to read, I listen to music. My phone has all kinds of music—Chinese, English, pop, classical, modern, nostalgic… Being able to listen to some music before sleep is a very pleasant thing. That day reading Han Han’s 1988, he said when he was young he liked listening to fast songs, later liked slow songs because he wanted to hear what they were singing. I had similar experiences. Freshman and sophomore year listening to Eminem, Green Day, Manson was my craziest time—I had to listen to a track before sleep too. Starting junior year, the songs I listened to gradually changed. In my phone I started collecting some sad, bright, gentle songs because I wanted to know what they were singing. So the memory card had songs by Chen Qizhen, Mayday, Liang Jingru, Stefanie Sun, Cao Fang. The saddest is listening to Liang Jingru in the dead of night, so I deliberately reduced her songs—occasional listening is enough. Then I transferred classical music transcoded from FLAC to my phone—Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Johann Strauss II, etc. They are neither restless nor sad, make me relaxed, and help me fall asleep the fastest.

Research institutions say people who sleep less have higher IQ, people who sleep more live longer. Choose high IQ or longer life? That’s the question. What do I want? I don’t want anything, I just don’t want to sleep too early.