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: