My insomnia continues apace, and every night is pretty much the same—or so it seems. I fall asleep at about 8:45 after reading for over an hour, which makes me quite tired. I never have problems falling asleep; the issue is that I wake up very early. And by “very early,” it could be 11 p.m., or, most often, between 1 and 2 a.m. I try not to look at my watch, which I put on the other side of the room with my phone, but after tossing and turning for a long time, I’m compelled to look, only to be depressed when I find out that it will be several more hours before my alarm goes off. (I long for the days when I’d fall asleep at 11 p.m. and arise, sans alarm, at 6 a.m.)
What’s curious is that many times when I think I’ve been awake most of the night I’ve actually fallen asleep without knowing it. The reason I know this is that I remember dreams I’ve had, and people don’t dream when they’re awake. Last night I woke up, looked at my watch, and found it was 1 a.m. “Oy!’, I thought, “I’ll be tossing and turning for several more hours.”
But somehow I fell asleep and had a very realistic—and disturbing—dream. I was in an urban area somewhere in Africa, in a car with a woman I did not know. As a present, she gave me a leather wristband, and fastened to it, with a leather thong, was an ugly, wriggling larva of some insect. The kicker was that this insect was apparently the cause of some terrible disease that killed many people. (I don’t know the species, but I could say it was the larva of a tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness.)
At any rate, somehow the larva broke loose, and with it all hell. The whole country somehow learned that I was responsible for releasing a deadly disease vector among the people, and soon everyone not only recognized me, but hated me. People avoided me on the streets, nobody would look me in the eye, and anything that went wrong was blamed on me. In the last incident before I woke up, I was at a big dinner and a huge plate full of food fell off the table, making an unholy mess. It was not my fault, but everyone agreed that “Jerry did it.”
This dream was so realistic that I woke up immediately (immediate waking helps you remember dreams), and felt awful. In fact, I felt so awful that I decided I was not going to get any more sleep, and so heaved myself out of bed at 3 a.m. and came to work. The curious thing, besides the dream, is that I feel very well rested. I suppose there are Apple-Watch-like devices that tell you how much sleep you get, but I don’t want to know: I gauge my sleep by how rested I feel the next day.
Readers are invited to share their dreams and nightmares, or even proffer an interpretation of my dream, though I’m not big on thinking that dreams have a meaning beyond reprising some things that happened or some things that you fear. (The most common dream of academics, which my advisor Dick Lewontin had every night of his life, is that it’s the day of your final exam and you either haven’t studied for it or can’t find the exam room.)
I ask only one thing, please don’t offer remedies for insomnia. I appreciate people trying to help, but I’ve been to at least five doctors, sleep experts, meditation counselors, anxiety specialists, and the like, and none of them helped. And I don’t want to try gummies.
Here’s a rendition of my dream from a reader, who said this:
I described your dream to ChatGPT and asked it to create an illustration of it. See attached—hopefully for your amusement.
Yes, I was greatly amused:
The last year or so, I also have been sleeping poorly. I seem to dream a lot, and wake up frequently, and all my dreams are annoying. My conscious mind has learned that my unconscious mind can’t handle reading or writing, so many of my dreams involve things like trying to unlock my phone. I can’t remember the last time I had a dream that wasn’t tedious.
Me, too. I think of it as an artifact of being old and I don’t like it. Of course, I don’t much like being old in general, either.
I share the sleep thing. Reasonably, you would think, going to bed when you’re tired at 9 and waking up at 11 and thinking OMG I slept ALL the way through, only to realize it’s 11 pm and that’s basically it until 4 or 5 am when you MIGHT get tired again and fall asleep for a couple more hours. Dreams too. None as possibly realistic as yours though.
Last night I dreamed that I was shot by one of Trump’s ICE/National Guard. I was waiting inside my apartment for a repairman. The doorbell rang but when I went to the door, no one was there. I stepped outside and saw the “repairman” in the yard next door. I called to him and he turned and shot me.
I gotta stop paying attention to the news.
Yikes! That’s a scary one. Time for a news break, for sure
Yikes. The hangover from a lousy dream like that is the worst.
It sounds like you exhibit the sleep pattern called biphasic sleep, a pattern that was common in medieval times and is standard in pre-industrial societies. It is often described as two sleep periods: first sleep and second sleep, divided very much along the lines you describe with a phase of wakefulness between the two periods of sleep.
Industrialized societies with artificial lighting and late-night activities (and alarm clocks that wake us for work at a pre-determined time) developed the belief that sleep should be a single, continuous period, but that may not be the more “natural” pattern for humans.
So the good news might be that what you experience is not insomnia, but simply a different, and historically older pattern of sleep-awake-sleep. The bad news might be that, if you don’t want to sleep in that pattern, you may be out of luck!
And the best way to deal with it is to get up and do something not overly stimulating until sleepy again. Screens would be a bad idea, but reading some more of the book that put you to sleep works well!
I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. This may work for you, but, as I implied above, different people have different cures.
I’ve recently been thinking about the idea of the “midnight snack,” which frequently appears in older movies and TV. That seems to be a weird thing to do, but maybe there’s a reason?
I once heard someone illustrate this with a literary passage in which ancient warriors wake in the night, congregate over food and conversation for a time, and then all return to sleep.
An elderly friend was lamenting not being able to sleep at night—she would routinely wake up for an hour or two—and she was still tired when her alarm sounded before her normal worktime. I told her, “You sit in a wheelchair and reside in an assisted living facility. Sleep, or wake, whenever your body tells you to!”
The civilized plague of the alarm clock and work-driven schedule is hard for many to overcome. The best part about retirement was being freed from the tyranny of the early risers.
The evidence of biphasic sleep is, IMHO, weak.
I’m not sure what your statement means.
That’s one creepy dream! For some reason when I have creepy dreams—completely absurd yet startlingly realistic—I tend to find them amusing. I had a long, contorted, bizarre, yet realistic dream the other night, which I related to my wife. It was so bizarre that I couldn’t take it seriously. Even in my dream I didn’t take it seriously. Go figure.
So sorry about your dream, it must have been so scary. Perhaps you are internalizing the horrifying antisemitism currently afoot…
Had plenty of insomnia in my life. No easy solutions. Hope your case improves.
I nearly always wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve found I can right back to sleep by moving to the couch. So now I sleep every night in two different places.
I don’t wake up as often as you do, but I do find that moving to the couch, or even turning around so my head is at the foot of the bed and vice versa, can be a cure.
I have a frequent nightmare that I go into my A level exam and find that I have been taught the wrong syllabus. In my case, this actually happened.
I am nocturnal by nature, no matter how much I have tried to change it. I sleep from 1 or 2 am until 8 or 9 am. I am fortunate that my work allows for this schedule.
If I go to bed at 9 or 10 pm, I will sleep for a couple hours and then wake up and not be able to get back to sleep, as happens to Jerry.
I am at my sleepiest around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and can easily nap for up to an hour, but try not to.
It appears to be hard wired into my being.
Insomnia is terrible; I had a bad bout of it last year, and the only thing that really helped was (legal) drugs. But everyone is different.
This may be the wrong crowd, but a few years ago (probably around the time “Coming 2 America” came out) I dreamed that Wakanda and Zamunda were having a competition for the distinction of being called the Most Advanced Nation On Earth. Wakanda’s entry involved a formula that would enable them to recycle absolutely every type of matter. Zamunda’s entry involved elaborate costumes and intricate choreography. I guess someone should have given the competition more specific parameters. Anyway, I woke up before a winner was declared.
Wait, wouldn’t the most common dream be that it’s the day of your final exam and you haven’t prepared it?
No, I’ve never heard an academic have a nightmare that involved him or her screwing up teaching. I guess being a student induces more anxiety than being a professor.
Well I’ve had that dream – as an academic, dreaming that I was late to a class I was teaching and/or had not prepared the lecture yet! In one such dream I just ad-libbed my way through a lecture on a topic I was not very familiar with.
I am a retired academic. I have a recurring dream that I keep forgetting to go to a class, or I am very late for a class, or I am in a class, but can’t seem to teach the material. Then I have dreams that I am on contract, and my department is not going to renew my contract. They department chair avoids me and won’t talk to me.
These dreams are very vivid, and I feel bad for hours after waking up.
Some time in 1988-90 period, I had a nightmare: I am lying in my bed at night, but instead of my wife, there is a huge lizard lying next to me. I woke up with a scream. Same exact room, same bed, only the lizard was replaced by my wife.
BTW I don’t like recalling my dreams because it tends to make subsequent dreams more vivid. It sometimes even seems to result in a nightmare next night. So “let sleeping dogs lie” is the watchword for me as far as dreams go.
It’s disappointing that ChatGPT generated a beetle grub instead of a Drosophila maggot.
One or more purring cats on the bed will put you to sleep.
Unfortunately this is not true for me!
I used to think alarm clocks were terrible, until I realized they prevent me from constantly looking at the clock. And at least this way, I’m not nervous when I keep waking up.
I have a reoccurring dream of suddenly being in a body of water and realizing my cell phone is in my pocket.
Some years ago I had a brief, delightful dream that reminds me of Jerry, for reasons that will be obvious.
I dreamed that I was watching a lecture by a biologist. It was a taxonomy lecture, I guess, but animals were grouped by COLOR rather than evolutionary relationships.
The lecturer was on the Whites. Up came a slide of a white duck. The lecturer called the species “the Panglossian Duck.”
P.S. This dream also reminds me of the postmodernists who claim that, because groupings and definitions are “social constructs,” therefore Other Ways of Knowing are just as valid as “Western” science, and men are women if they say they are. No doubt they would find my dream lecturer’s taxonomy perfectly cromulent.
I’ve never had insomnia other than that due to jet lag which I found easily solvable by using benzodiazepine sleeping pills (temazepam). Jet lag can cause sleep-onset insomnia which responds well to most sleeping pills. But a neurologist friend who suffered sleep-maintenance type insomnia – the type described by Dr. Coyne – once told me that the orexin antagonist sleeping pill Belsomra works best for that.
71 years old, retired, and just last night I dreamed that I had a research paper due the following day that I hadn’t even started on.
I am also 71 and retired. I have dreams of the type you described, too.
The dream worm may be you recalling the botfly larvae that burrowed into your scalp, see Radiolab episode.
Radiolab: Glad Somebody Likes Bugs
I think a smart watch, even for a short trial, is a good idea. I used to be convinced that I was lying awake half the night, but when I started using my Galaxy watch I found that I was getting some sleep between the waking times, so I stopped worrying about the awake periods.
A smart watch doesn’t just monitor the amount of sleep itself, it monitors the quality of sleep showing the amount of REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep and waking periods during the night. I’m sometimes surprised that I’ve had a bit of deep sleep when I’d convinced myself that I was awake all night.
It’s reassuring to know that, even if I get up at 3am to work, I have actually had some sleep.
My watch also monitors blood oxygen levels during sleep, stress levels and can record snoring, so I can’t pretend any more that I don’t snore 😂
The author of the bl – , sorry – the website The Online Photographer just had an entry on his new biphasic sleep pattern, engendered by his ailing dog. He is extolling its merits, as he uses his four hours of wakefulness in productive writing:
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2025/06/butters-last-gift.html
I once had a dream where I was flying over a beautiful landscape. The grass was the most intense shade of green and the cars and houses were bright primary colours. I wish I could have that dream again.
I have wished for that dream for over five decades now. I still remember how real it felt to be a bird, flying from one rooftop to the next.