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This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
00:59:54
Mike Birbiglia talks about the sleepwalking that nearly killed him.
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- [00:01]
Ira Glass
This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet terms apply. See capitalone.combank for details. Capital One, NA Member FDIC.
- [00:17]
Mike Birbiglia
As early as I remember, I was afraid to go to sleep. This began when I was six. My Uncle Lenny went off to Vietnam. And that opened up this chapter in my life where I was obsessed with death. I was scared that Uncle Annie was going to be killed. But more than that, his absence underscored the fact that someday, no matter what, I was going to be drafted and I'd have to go to Vietnam and I'd be killed. And there was nothing that I or anybody I knew could do to stop that. I knew I was going to be killed because I was chubby and I was terrible at sports. I could barely run half a block on tv. War seemed to involve a lot of running. There was crouching, there was shooting, but there was a disturbing amount of running. So I was 6, and I knew I was going to die. And my mom and dad couldn't help me. Nobody could help me. I'd be dead forever. Galaxies would spin. Humans would travel to other worlds, and I would miss all of that. Nobody would remember me or anybody that I had ever known forever. And a guy awake at night, scared to fall asleep because sleep seemed no different than death. You know, you were gone, not moving, not talking, not thinking, not aware. Not aware. What could be more frightening? What could be bigger? And here was the weird part of it, I thought, when I was a kid, somehow, every night, all the adults, all my relatives, every teacher, everybody who I ever heard of headed off for bed like this was no big deal. Complete annihilation, no big deal. For those of us who fear sleep, there is a lot to fear. And that's what we're going to talk about on today's radio show is a survey of this altered state. This altered state where we're vulnerable and just gone having dreams where anything at all can happen. Not in control of our own bodies. Listen, what happened to this woman, Denise.
- [02:21]
Ira Glass
It wasn't till I was maybe, I don't know, 8 or 9 years old that one day I woke up and it was like my eyes were open. I was looking around. I just couldn't move. I couldn't move my arms or my legs. I couldn't turn my head. And I felt this, like, weight on my chest. And the first thing I thought was, oh, my God, what happened to me? Was I in a Car accident. It lasted for, I don't know, maybe 30 seconds to a minute. And then I just kind of snapped out of it, and I was really freaked out. And I went and told my mom, you know, I think something's wrong with me. And my family's Mexican, and in Mexico, they have this superstition that they say the devil is sitting on your chest when that happens to you. And she said, oh, don't worry. It was just the devil sitting on your chest. Like that's supposed to make me feel better.
- [03:21]
Mike Birbiglia
As Denise got older, this paralysis has happened more and more. And sometimes when she's lying there paralyzed and awake, she hallucinates. She sees family members who aren't there, or she hears them, and sometimes they're mad at her. Though the only time all this happens to Denise is when she takes a nap during the day.
- [03:42]
Ira Glass
I've definitely avoided taking naps, no matter how tired I was. I mean, I forced myself to survive on, like, five or six hours of sleep. Very little sleep.
- [03:51]
Mike Birbiglia
It's like that movie where what's his name appears as soon as you fall asleep.
- [03:56]
Ira Glass
Freddy Krueger.
- [03:57]
Mike Birbiglia
Yeah, Freddy Krueger. Right.
- [03:58]
Nancy Updike
Yeah.
- [03:59]
Mike Birbiglia
Yeah.
- [04:00]
Ira Glass
In college, it was happening to me so regularly that I basically survived on Red Bull in not much else.
- [04:11]
Mike Birbiglia
Then there's Ron, vaguely. He'd wake up after an hour or two of sleep and find himself, for example, still in bed there with his wife.
- [04:18]
Joel Lovell
A couple of times I was. Had my hands around her neck, choking her. And then until I came out of it.
- [04:27]
Mike Birbiglia
She would just wake you up, is that it?
- [04:29]
Joel Lovell
Well, yeah. She'd start screaming, and then I would kind of come out of it.
- [04:35]
Mike Birbiglia
Was it hard for you to see this side of yourself? Like, you know what I mean? Like, you wake up and your hands are around the throat of the person who you love?
- [04:43]
Joel Lovell
Well, yeah, it was hard. And I was worried that I was gonna hurt somebody, like hurt my kids or my wife. And I felt miserable in a day thinking about, you know, what I did.
- [04:54]
Mike Birbiglia
You must have dreaded going to bed.
- [04:56]
Joel Lovell
Yep. You know, I mean, you're going to sleep tired, knowing that this is gonna happen. Yeah, that wasn't much fun.
- [05:16]
Seth Lynn
Well, we have just witnessed a vivid example of a night terror of Pavlo nocturnus associated with violent behavior. This episode arose abruptly from slow wave or delta sleep, nocturnal seizures.
- [05:28]
Mike Birbiglia
This is from a DVD put together by doctors Carlos Schenk and Mark Mahowald of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center. The number of adults with troubled sleep, they say, is a lot higher than you probably think somewhere between 1.5 and 4, 5.4% of all adults have had recent sleepwalking episodes. Depending on what study you look at, that's millions of people. Another 2% engage in sleep related violence. People eat when they're asleep, they have sex when they're asleep. And one of the most affecting things to watch on this DVD that they assembled to educate people about various sleep disorders is a 51 year old Japanese man who was videotaped while having a bad dream.
- [06:07]
Carol Kane
Oh, I thought I went oh.
- [06:15]
Mike Birbiglia
The man later told researchers that in this dream he's fighting off snakes. And in this kind of grainy nighttime footage, you can see him swat away snakes with his arms. He kicks at one with his foot. That metal sound you're hearing is the bed frame. Finally, he picks up a pillow like it's a rock and beats one away. There's something completely naked about this footage. It's very strange to watch another person at a moment when they are so totally vulnerable and alone and terrified. Welcome to WBEZ Chicago. It's this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show Fear of Sleep, we have five stories of people who either have a huge fear of sleep or frankly, they should have a huge fear of sleep. Act 1 Stranger in the Night Act 2 Sleep's Tiniest Enemies Act 3, the Bitter Fruits of Wakefulness Act 4 Hollywood Induced Nightmare Act 5, A Small Taste of the Big Sleep. Stay with us.
- [07:40]
Nancy Updike
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- [08:40]
Mike Birbiglia
You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from. Whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney or the godfather of Artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton or some of my extraordinarily well Informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. This is American Life. Today's show is a rerun. Act one, Stranger in the Night. There's a poem by Raymond Carver that goes, I woke up with a spot of blood over my eye, a scratch halfway across my forehead, but I'm sleeping alone these days. Why on earth would a man raise his hand against himself, even in sleep? It's this and similar questions I'm trying to answer this morning as I study my face in the window. Well, that is probably about as good an introduction as you could get for this first story from Mike Birbiglia. He told it in front of a live audience. That at the Moth in New York.
- [09:44]
Seth Lynn
About seven years ago, I started walking in my sleep, and I would have these recurring dreams that there was a hovering insect like jackal in our bedroom. And I was living with my girlfriend at the time, and I would jump on the bed and I would strike a karate pose. I'd never taken karate, but I had the books from book fair. And I would say, abby, that was my girlfriend. There's a jackal in the room. And she got so used to it, she could talk me down while remaining asleep. She said, there's no jackal in the room. Go, go to bed. And I would say, are you sure? She would say, yes, Michael, go to bed. There's no jackal. And I would say, okay. And I would go to bed knowing that there was a jackal. And that's trust. It was around that time I had a dream that I was in the Olympics for some kind of arbitrary event like dustbustering. And they told me I got third place. And I stood up on the third place podium, and I'm feeling good about myself. I'm new to the sport, you know, and. And they say, you know, actually, we reconsidered and you got first place. And I was like, oh, that's a marvelous promotion. You know, I got first place. I move over to the first place podium, and it starts wobbling and it's wobbling and wobbling. And I wake up and I'm falling off the top of our bookcase in our living room. And I land on the floor hard on top of our TiVo, and it broke into pieces, and I'm disoriented on the floor. It's like one of these stories where people blackout drinking and they wake up in Idaho and they don't know where they are, and they're like, oh, no, Hardy you know, or whatever's there. But it was. But it was in my own living room. I was just like, oh, no TiVo pieces, you know, And I went to bed, and Abby woke me up in the morning, and she said, michael.
- [12:46]
Joel Lovell
What.
- [12:47]
Seth Lynn
Happened to the T foam? And I said, I got first place. And it's a long story. So at this point, I thought, you know, maybe I should see a doctor. And then I thought, maybe I'll eat dinner, because that seems more convenient. But a lot of people would say this to me. You know, my parents. You know, my dad's a doctor. He'd say, you know, you should really see a doctor. And I remember, you know, saying, you know, I'm really busy, and thinking these people were crazy, you know, like, they don't know how busy I am. And so I never went to a doctor. But I did purchase a book by a doctor named Dr. Dement, which is not the most calming name for a sleep doctor, but it's called the Promise of Sleep. And I learned. And these are helpful tips, I learned turn off cable news or the news before bed, turn off your cell phone, turn off the Internet, your computer, don't have big meals, that kind of thing. And I came across in the sleep disorders, a disorder that resembled symptoms of mine, and it was called REM Behavior Disorder. And people who have this have a dopamine deficiency. And dopamine is the chemical that's released from your brain into your body, that paralyzes your body when you fall asleep so that you don't do what's in your brain. So I thought, maybe I have this. And then I thought, maybe I'll eat dinner. And so I never went to see a doctor until about three years ago. I was performing at a college in Walla Walla, Washington. I'm a comedian by trade, and I was staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn. And some people correct me. They go, no, no, no, it's La Quinta. I'm like, that's not fair. You can't force me to speak Spanish. And I fell asleep watching the news, you know, and it was sort of a story about war and something very chaotic. And I fell asleep, and I had a dream that there was a guided missile headed towards my room. And there's all these military personnel in the room with me. And I jump out of bed, and I'm like, what's the plan? And they say, it's come to our attention the missile coordinates are set specifically on you. And I thought, that's very bad, because I don't have a plan for that one. So I decided to jump out the window in my dream and as it turns out, in my life. And there are two important details. One, I was on the second floor of La Quinta in. And two, the window was closed. So I jumped through a window like the Hulk. And I say that because that's how I described it at the emergency room in Walla Walla, Washington. I was like, you know, the Hulk, you know, he just kind of jumps through stuff. So I jump through the window and I scream, ah. And what was remarkable is that people with this disorder are capable of doing things they couldn't do in their everyday life. It's like blacking out, drinking, where you don't feel any pain or inhibition. I jumped through a second story window and I landed on the front lawn of the hotel. I took a spill, I got back up and I kept running. And I'm running and I'm slowly realizing I'm on the front lawn of La Quinta in. In my underwear, bleeding. And I'm like, oh, no. And it was one of those rare moments in your life where in retrospect, you're like, what the hell? And at the time, you're like, I guess I'll walk to the front desk and explain what happened. Fortunately, the person working at the front desk was completely unfazed by what had just happened. It's three in the morning, the phones are ringing off the hook from people staying at the hotel who just saw the guy jump out the window screaming, I'm bleeding in my underwear. And I say hello. Because as it turns out, you have to start somewhere. I'm staying at the hotel Credibility. I had an incident wherein I jumped out of my window, I am bleeding, and I need to go to a hospital. And I'll never forget his reaction because he just goes, huh? And I thought, this is the best possible reaction I could receive at this juncture. And so I drove myself to the hospital. I checked myself into the emergency room. I had to explain what happened three times. You know, the nurse and the doctor in the front desk. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. And the doctor, God bless him, worked on me until about 5:30 in the morning. And he put 30 stitches in my arms and in my legs. And even he's an emergency room doctor. And even he was like, you should be dead. And I was like, no, you should. I zinged him. And then I. About 5:30, I drove back to the hotel and I checked out and I actually, I paid for the window like any good window jumper would. And it was $300 for the window and about 49 for the room. And I went back to New York and I did what I should have done in the first place. When I saw the Jackal, I went to a doctor who specializes in sleepwalk disorders. So now when I go to bed at night, I take a very strong pill and I sleep in a sleeping bag up to my neck and I wear mittens so I can't open the sleeping bag. And so in closing, I think that if it weren't for denial, I wouldn't be a comedian. Because to be a comedian you have to go on stage those first few years and bomb and then walk off stage and think that went great because otherwise you'd never get on stage the next night. You would just think, human beings don't like me. But sometimes denial can kill you. Thank you very much.
- [22:06]
Mike Birbiglia
Mike Bodiglia. He was recorded at the Moth, which of course has a podcast and public radio show. Their website, themoth.org Years ago, Mike wrote and directed and starred in a movie based on the true story that you just heard. It's comedy called Sleepwalk with Me, this American Life. And WBEZ produced the film. I was one of the co writers with Mike. Carol Kane and Lauren Ambrose are in the cast. You can find it on Prime Video, Apple TV and many other streaming services. I totally recommend it. It's funny, if you have a sleep disorder of the kind that we've been talking about so far today, there's very effective treatment. See a doctor. Okay. There's a little pill called Klonopin like Rubiglia said. The DVD that Dr. Carlos Schenk made explaining sleep disorders that we heard earlier in the top of the show is called sleep runners. Dr. Schenk also has this beautifully put together book about all this called Paradox.
- [22:54]
Nancy Updike
Lost took a pill last night just.
- [22:58]
Seth Lynn
To get to sleep.
- [22:59]
Carol Kane
Put me on my back.
- [23:01]
Seth Lynn
Not.
- [23:04]
Mike Birbiglia
Act 2 Sleep's tiniest enemies. We now turn to people who battle at night, but not with their own dreams. These people battle critters, living creatures of the night. One of the producers of our show, Nancy Updike, has been looking into this.
- [23:19]
Robin Semion
I talked to a woman in Baltimore with an unusual name and she doesn't want that name linked in anyone's mind with a house full of pests. So I agreed to call her Ms. M on the radio. Ms. M has had some very bad nighttime experiences with roaches, starting with her old place on Liberty Heights Avenue.
- [23:38]
Carol Kane
It was about 2 o' clock in the morning, I was laying on the couch. I was on the couch because all the rooms was full. And I just felt something in my ear. And I knew exactly what it was when I felt it. And it was making this. And I jumped up and I started screaming. My, my. She came out the room and we told everybody else in the house, we on our way to the hospital. They stuck this thing in my ear about this long, pulled it out. It did take but a minute to get out.
- [24:12]
Ira Glass
And he.
- [24:13]
Robin Semion
He showed it to you? It was a roach.
- [24:14]
Carol Kane
He showed it to me.
- [24:16]
Robin Semion
How big was.
- [24:17]
Carol Kane
Was a big one. It was a big one. A little tiny one. Cost me about $165 to get him out. The doctor's gonna charge me.
- [24:27]
Robin Semion
Ms. M doesn't live in that place anymore. She lives in a small house in o' Donnell Heights. The house is tidy, but it's public housing and it has serious multiple infestations. The mice in Ms. M's apartment have abated temporarily this week for some reason, which has left the gluey mouse traps free for armies of roaches to get stuck on. Every sticky rectangle has dozens of roaches on it waving their doomed antennae. And yet, in spite of the glue traps, the raid, the boric acid, there are still roaches in every drawer she pulls open for me. Every cabinet, the sink. They mill by the hinges of closet doors. They saunter down the walls, absolutely unafraid. Nighttime, of course, is the worst. Ms. M's daughter, Brittany, without even hearing her mother's roach in ear story, told me she got a roach in her ear too. Not just once.
- [25:17]
Carol Kane
Twice. Got in my ear twice. And when I got in my boyfriend ear, we had to go to the emergency room.
- [25:22]
Robin Semion
Was it hard to go to sleep after they got in your ear? Was it scary?
- [25:26]
Carol Kane
I started putting tissue in my ear so they can't bother me as much. But yeah, it was hard to go to sleep. They crawled on the beat. I didn't like it. Yeah, it was hard. It was very hard because it was a lot.
- [25:39]
Robin Semion
A lot is exactly, exactly the problem.
- [25:41]
Carol Kane
Ms. M says you got to have a lot of roaches in your house to get them in your ear. Cause it's one or two. It's not. They not going for your ear. They looking for some food.
- [25:50]
Robin Semion
They just end up in your ear by mistake.
- [25:52]
Carol Kane
Yeah, yeah. And then they don't. They can't go backwards, so they can't come out. Forces only go out one way.
- [26:00]
Robin Semion
Ms. M says she's not looking to Move. The neighborhood's pretty safe. There's no gunfire at night. The kids can play outside. And she's not mad at the city. Her landlord. She's lived with roaches for a long time and her expectations for getting rid of them pretty low. She's gracious, letting me ask questions about how many bugs she and her family deal with every night. Is it 500, 5,000? But she also makes clear that for her, the questions are beside the point.
- [26:27]
Carol Kane
Y' all have to say anything about roaches. I wouldn't think about roaches. It's a normal thing, really. You know, we just live with it. We just live with it.
- [26:44]
Mike Birbiglia
A story from Nancy Updike and oh, we are not done. We are not done with the critters that make people scared to climb inside their own beds. These people that you're about to hear, they all live in the same apartment building.
- [26:56]
Carol Kane
We didn't know exactly what it was.
- [26:58]
Seth Lynn
But, you know, something was biting us.
- [27:03]
Carol Kane
Well, I always complain to my wife, look at this. You know, I mean, I said, no, something biting me.
- [27:11]
Mike Birbiglia
We're pretty sure that they're coming from inside the walls and maybe maybe up through the floorboards.
- [27:17]
Carol Kane
And I told my husband, I say, I seen bedbugs.
- [27:25]
Mike Birbiglia
Years ago at 349St. John's Place in Brooklyn. You would be able to tell that the bed bugs had returned by the amount of furniture being thrown out on the curb. If you walk down the block, you'd see mattresses and bookcases spray painted with the words bed bugs do not use in big letters to warn off neighbors who might think of taking the stuff home. Robin Semion, another one of our producers, stopped inside.
- [27:48]
Stephanie
Though Stephanie agreed to talk to me, at first she didn't want to invite me inside her apartment. She and her husband and five year old daughter never have guests over and haven't for years because of the bed bugs. Like Ms. M. She asks that we not give her real name. Her kid's gotta go to school and she's gotta deal with moms who might hear this on the radio. So that's why I'm calling her Stephanie. Her sleep is interrupted all the time by bedbugs, by the full grown ones that are brown and easy to spot and the babies that are just little.
- [28:17]
Denise
White specks waking up in the middle of the night. Sometimes you'll find them and they're white and then their belly is filled with your blood and sort of their belly is all red and you can see it. But once I realized that there were these Little white things. And I was sleeping on white sheets with little blue dots. And then that's when the sheets felt like they were crawling, which is really unmistakable. And so hard to sleep in a bed where you feel like the sheets are crawling. When I would wake up with bites, if I found them or didn't find them, I knew more bites were coming. So the process of going back to sleep is filled with thoughts of more bugs coming.
- [29:08]
Stephanie
The bed bugs didn't take over the building overnight. Like many of the residents. They've been there for years, locked in a tug of war where sometimes the residents are winning and sometimes it's the bugs. When the bugs arrived, Stephanie's daughter was just two and started waking up in the middle of the night scratching and crying. Stephanie and her husband moved her to a different room and pretty soon had to relocate themselves, too, out of their own bedroom to sleep on an air mattress in the living room. This was a complete failure. The bugs followed. It turns out Stephanie says they'd simply moved the bug's food source, the food source being them. And it drove her crazy.
- [29:49]
Denise
There's a lot, you know, the thing about in the middle of the night, there's a lot of adrenaline in the middle of the night. These, like, middle of the night bites and trying to figure out where they were. I mean, it's not just sort of you're waking up and scratching and you're sleeping. And it's like I would wake up in full combat mode. Rage, rage, rage, rage. And then back to bed sucks. I definitely upped my coffee intake during that time. I mean, I was definitely trying to. Needing to compensate for the fact that I wasn't getting a flat night's sleep. I think it was. Made me a little more twisted feeling. A little twisted, dark. There's a feeling of like I am being assaulted and there's nothing I can do.
- [30:54]
Stephanie
Stephanie and her husband exterminated. They bought their own pesticides. They put all of their clothes, sheets, towels, pillows, and all of their daughter's toys in clean plastic bags and lived out of the plastic bags. They threw out half the books they owned and then vacuumed the bugs out of each page of the books they kept, put them in plastic bags. They coated the legs of their beds in Vaseline because Stephanie read somewhere that the bed bugs couldn't climb on Vaseline. They couldn't afford to move. Lately, it seems to be working. And when you visit their apartment, you can't tell anything's wrong. It's clean, it's neat. And when I ask Stephanie, if I might see a bed bug somewhere. She doesn't seem sure, but says we might find a stray in the couch she's sitting on. It has dark brown cushions and a dark wood frame, and it's sentimental to Stephanie and her husband. The first piece of furniture they bought when they moved in together a few years ago. To save it from the bed bugs, Stephanie's husband replaced the foam and reupholstered it himself.
- [31:52]
Denise
You want to see one? I understand. To be honest, I think. I don't really want to know the full extent. In the couch.
- [32:01]
Mike Birbiglia
Let's take a look.
- [32:03]
Stephanie
She squats by the couch and starts to pull at the corner of the seat cushion.
- [32:08]
Seth Lynn
Oh.
- [32:11]
Denise
Oh, no. I may actually have a little freak out.
- [32:17]
Ira Glass
What did you see in there?
- [32:19]
Denise
So there's a little burgeoning bed bug colony in that. See these folds? This is where they like to. But it's on this side, so you can take a peek if you like. See, I haven't.
- [32:32]
Ira Glass
You are a pro. I see nothing. No, you will.
- [32:40]
Stephanie
To me, it doesn't look like much like brown dust or tobacco that's come out of a cigarette and some white powder mixed in.
- [32:47]
Denise
Oh, my God.
- [32:48]
Stephanie
But it hits Stephanie much harder, like, here we go again.
- [32:53]
Denise
That looks mostly like. Actually, it looks mostly like grown bed bugs with a few white. I haven't been getting that many bites on the couch, but the fact that it's in the upholstery makes it. There's just nothing to be done. And it's totally. It's like there's no way that we could. I'll probably go and get the pesticide that we have just so these guys don't get dinner tonight. And then tomorrow I'll ask my husband to take the couch downstairs.
- [33:28]
Ira Glass
Oh, I'm sorry.
- [33:29]
Denise
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Stephanie
A few years ago, Stephanie decided to do an experiment to see how long the bed bugs could live without food, without feeding on her family. She found two baby bed bugs and kept them in a sealed plastic deli container on her windowsill. Months passed, and instead of dying, they bred. She'd grown a colony of bedbugs and an apartment of bedbugs and a building of bedbugs. She ended up tossing the whole thing out because she could and because she was scared they might find a way to escape.
- [34:13]
Mike Birbiglia
Robin Semion. A week or two after we first broadcast this story in 2008, the landlord at 3 349St. John's Place hired a new exterminator, started treating the building regularly. Stephanie told us it worked that her apartment became bug free. The rest of the country is not quite so lucky. There's a huge bed bug boom in New York and major cities around the country. Coming up, somebody who consciously trains himself not to fall asleep and then has to suffer the consequences and more. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
- [34:48]
Ira Glass
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- [35:18]
Nancy Updike
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- [35:52]
Ira Glass
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- [36:16]
Mike Birbiglia
It'S this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Fear of Sleep. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show, Act 3, the bitter fruits of Wakefulness. We have this story from Joel Lovell, a warning before we start this story to sensitive listeners that the story acknowledges the existence of sex and sexual feelings.
- [36:39]
Joel Lovell
I've been told that the insomnia I've struggled with on and off for most of my life comes from drinking too much caffeine or eating too much sugar or sleeping on a bed that's too soft or too hard or too flat, that I don't exercise enough or that I exercise too much, or that I exercise the right amount but at the wrong time of day, or that it's the result of watching TV or using a computer right before I go to bed. Though, isn't that when everyone pokes around on the computer or watches tv? I've also been told that I should have more sex, which was good to hear, but then I was told I should have less. What my insomnia is really about is being afraid. I don't mean being afraid of something happening to my daughters or to my wife, or to my job or whatever other adult fears. I mean it's about being afraid. When I was a kid, specifically when I was 11 years old, the year I trained myself not to sleep, it wasn't that hard. I had all the normal childhood fears to draw on. Pops Ferrara, for instance. He was on my Pee Wee football team, a fifth grader just like me, though he was the kind of fifth grader who could get the nickname Pops. He was squat and bow legged and crazily muscular and he had a raspy voice that was indistinguishable from the voice of his father who was also called Pops. Once in practice I reached out to slap hands with Pops the younger and he took hold of my wrist and turned my hand palm up and hawked a huge loogie into the center of it. He scared the crap out of me. It wasn't just Pops though. I was afraid of the Panic twins with their fantastic breasts and the way they sat on the jungle gym smoking their parents cigarettes. I was afraid of not doing perfectly in school and then afraid of being the kid who did perfectly in school. I was afraid of hobos. This isn't a joke. We lived on a dead end street next to a railroad track and one night my father woke up and chased two of them out of our house. I was afraid of my father having a heart attack because his father had died of a heart attack when he was a kid and had been buried in the cemetery across the street from his house. And I was afraid that when my father died of his heart attack it would be on a night when my older brother didn't come home until very late, which was happening more and more. He was 17 years old, a senior in high school, and something bad had come undone in him. He'd started going out each night and coming home at midnight and then sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, wild eyed and belligerent, saying weird stuff that we attributed to his being drunk or high but that much later we realized were the first signs of his schizophrenia. My father would sit in the fake leather recliner in our living room in his boxer shorts and T shirt, waiting for my brother to come home, and the moment my brother opened the door, the questions and shouting and occasional furniture toppling fist fight would erupt. I stayed up those nights and watched out my window, waiting for my brother to suddenly appear beneath the street lamp on our block. One night he stopped there and did an impromptu martial arts kata, punching and kicking the air in front of him for nearly half an hour in the middle of the circle of white light. As soon as I saw him, I'd get out of bed and go into the living room, hoping that my presence there would keep things from escalating, which occasionally it did, and so I taught myself not to go to sleep. It was mostly just a matter of queuing up the highlight reel of anxiety and letting the images flicker away inside my head. Pops Ferrara pinning me to the ground and spitting in my face. Or the hobos who at that very moment were no doubt sitting on the tracks above our house waiting for the lights to go out. Or my dad's weak heart and what his face would look like when it started to clench inside his chest. I dialed up all the imaginary drama inside my head, which kept me awake, which then allowed me to dial down the very real drama that existed each night inside our house. And it worked. It worked so well, in fact, that almost immediately there were consequences. By training myself to fear sleep, it became my default mode. I set myself up for a lifetime of late night distress, unproductive self probing, and troubling discoveries I'd never have made if I hadn't been awake in the middle of the night. The first, and maybe the biggest, came at the end of our Pee Wee football season in the fall of 1977. We played all the local teams and won all our games. And so we were selected to play in a Pee Wee sanctioned Turkey bowl in Seaford, Long island, seven hours away. When our coach gave us the news, all the kids on my team raised their helmets in the air and hooted like they'd seen real players do on tv. What I thought was, oh, Jesus, another two weeks of dodging Pops Ferrara. Great. It was worse than that, though. We weren't going to bunk together in motel rooms, which would have been bad enough. We were going to stay with the families of players on the opposing team. As you might imagine, I was a kid who dreaded sleeping over at anyone's house, much less a stranger's, in part because of garden variety anxiety and in part because I worried about what might happen in my own house if I wasn't there. I tried every excuse to get out of it, but nothing worked. And so when the time arrived, I ate breakfast in silence as my mother packed my lunch, then rode with my father to the parking lot outside Perkins Pancake House, where I boarded our bus and sat as far away from pops as possible. 300 or so miles later we arrived in another parking lot and car after car pulled up and took my teammates away. Eventually the family I'd be staying with arrived, a big square headed man with his two sons, smaller versions of him, one a few years older than I was and the other my age. They sat silently on either side of me in the back seat of their station wagon as their father talked about football all the way back to their home. Their mother greeted us on their front lawn. Her face was sweet and chubby and she wore a fightin Irish baseball cap over her Brillowy hair. She put her arm around my shoulders as she led me into their house. It was dark in there, all heavy furniture and curtains and there was Notre Dame paraphernalia all over the place. A Notre Dame blanket and throw pillow on the sofa, a Notre Dame latch hook rug on the dark paneled family room wall, Notre Dame posters all over the bedroom that the brothers shared. The kid my age, the one I'd be playing the next day, he barely talked to me, and his older brother spoke only when he wanted to mock the two of us. We sat in their TV room and watched a college football game while the father, who was also an assistant coach of his son's team, unleashed an endless commentary about blocking and short pass routes and the wishbone offense. Before dinner I stared into my plate as they said grace. We had pot roast and potatoes, which my mother cooked all the time, but this didn't taste like hers. Even their ice cubes had a weird smell to them, and after dessert and more endless football talk, we played Atari, which the mother told the two brothers to include me in. She must have sensed my discomfort because before bed she looked into my eyes and said that if there was anything I wanted they were just down the hall, that it was no bother to wake them if I needed to. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag between the two brothers beds. They had NFL bedspreads and a Pittsburgh Steelers poster on the ceiling overhead. We talked for a few minutes about the game the next day and the older brother went on about how my team was going to slaughter his brothers, which was kind of him. And then before long we stopped talking and they both drifted off to sleep. I don't know how much time passed in my memory. It's hours, though that can't really be the case. I started thinking of home, wondering if my parents were awake and if my brother was still out. And then I started wondering if the mother here in this house would check on us. When it was clear she wasn't going to, I got up and went to the bathroom and hoped that she'd hear me in there. I turned on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror, flushed the toilet and let the water run. For a while. I didn't know what I'd say to her, but I just wanted her to come out and comfort me in some way. Maybe give me something to drink or some more pie or just talk to me for a while about my parents or school or the wishbone offense for all I cared. I stepped back into the hallway and stood there in my pajamas listening to the house. The parents were still awake in their room. A light was on and so I walked to their door and knocked on it, thinking I'd apologize and then ask for a glass of water. I nudged the door open and there was the mother on her bed and behind her the father, red faced and naked. I had no idea what I was seeing, just that I shouldn't be. Her head was bent toward the sheets and she never lifted it. He looked right at me. He was pale and fat and there was a scar that ran vertically from his navel. Neither of us said a thing. I closed the door and hurried back to the boys bedroom and waited for something to happen. But nothing did. The next morning the mother would make pancakes and bacon and the father would come in from outdoors and tousle my hair and say it was a cold day for a football game. Neither of them would hint at what happened in the bedroom that was all hours away, though I lay there for a while listening to the sound of the brothers breathing on either side of me, simultaneously trying to block out and then bring into sharper focus what I had just seen to make sense of what it all meant. I was 11 years old. My brother, who I was closer to than anyone in the world, was turning into someone I no longer knew. I was lying on a floor in the house of complete strangers and I just opened the door on a large pale man having sex with his sweet matronly wife, the closest thing to my mother for 300 miles. You just have no idea what's going on. At any moment in any family, in any house, pretty much everything in life is an absolute friggin mystery. There was still a lot of night ahead of me.
- [46:43]
Mike Birbiglia
Joe Lovell, he edits podcasts for Pineapple Street Studios.
- [46:57]
Nancy Updike
Hello, Keith, it's Seth.
- [46:59]
Mike Birbiglia
This is the production manager of our radio show, Seth Lynn, calling his Uncle Keith about an incident that is actually the subject of this Next Act. Act 4. An incident that happened to Seth when he should have been sleeping over 20 years ago.
- [47:11]
Nancy Updike
What it's calling about is I wanted to know if you remembered something which was there was one night when you were staying over and I woke up in the middle of the night and you were watching the Shining.
- [47:25]
Seth Lynn
The movie?
- [47:26]
Nancy Updike
The movie the Shining. Do you remember me watching that with you? I do not really. I vaguely remember myself watching it. Yeah. I watched almost the whole thing with you. I was six. You were six years old. I was six. Okay.
- [47:52]
Seth Lynn
I remember bits of the movie.
- [47:54]
Nancy Updike
Do you remember the elevator doors opening and blood rushing out?
- [47:59]
Joel Lovell
That I do not really.
- [48:02]
Nancy Updike
I remember that was right when I sat down and that happened and I didn't know what was going on. And you said, do you know what that is? And I said, is it mud? And you said, no, it's blood. Honestly, I do not recollect.
- [48:18]
Mike Birbiglia
Well, that was totally unsatisfying.
- [48:22]
Nancy Updike
Yeah, I like how he wasn't sorry in the least. Yeah, like, oh, you want to watch the movie too? Just two dudes watching a movie.
- [48:32]
Mike Birbiglia
Seth had a very common childhood experience. He saw a film that he shouldn't have seen and it had exactly the effect you'd think after seeing the Shining, he had trouble falling asleep and nightmares every night. And here's where it gets a little extreme. This lasted for most of two years. It lasted so long probably because the film was the Shining. A film that is not only truly scary, it starred a six year old boy, same age as Seth at the time. And if you remember the Shining, the director Stanley Kubrick is constantly shooting from the six year old's perspective. There are all those amazing shots done from kid level height as the little boy speeds down the hallways of this huge hotel on his big Wheel. This made everything in the film seem very, very real to Seth.
- [49:18]
Nancy Updike
It just made it plausible. You know, I think it was just a really quick decision, like I'm that kid, as simple as that. It's like, oh, hey look, I'm on the tv. And there's really, really, really terrible things happening to me and my family.
- [49:34]
Seth Lynn
Tony. I'm scared.
- [49:40]
Nancy Updike
And I think that's why it got so far under my skin. Over the course of a day, I would. Well, first of all, I would feel this extreme pleasure in the morning when I woke up because I had gotten through the night and it was like every day was this relief. But then as the day went on, I would start to feel this dread because I knew I was gonna have to go to sleep. I knew it was going to get dark.
- [50:07]
Mike Birbiglia
It was like you were doomed.
- [50:08]
Nancy Updike
Yeah, it was just. It was like I knew exactly what was gonna happen.
- [50:13]
Mike Birbiglia
And just describe. You would be lying there trying to fall asleep.
- [50:16]
Nancy Updike
I'd lie down and really quickly just one of these images would just pop in my mind, you know, I mean, the blood coming out of the elevator was huge. Also, there are these twin girls who in the movie are sort of spectral characters that only Dani, the little kid, can see.
- [50:38]
Mike Birbiglia
And they should have shot like Dian Arbus twins, sort of spooky, standing side by side, kind of intoning straight to the camera.
- [50:45]
Nancy Updike
Exactly. And there's shot intercutting between them speaking and pictures of their chopped up corpses. That was the biggest one, the image that would pop into my head the most.
- [51:00]
Mike Birbiglia
It's interesting. You talked to your parents about this on tape a couple weeks ago.
- [51:04]
Nancy Updike
Yeah.
- [51:05]
Mike Birbiglia
And it's clear they knew that something was happening, but somehow they don't know how deep it goes. Hold on, let me just push a button here.
- [51:17]
Nancy Updike
The protagonist is like a little boy and I was six and he must have been around that age or so.
- [51:23]
Ira Glass
Wasn't there. Was there a little girl too?
- [51:25]
Nancy Updike
Well, there were two little girls who were twin sisters who were murdered.
- [51:31]
Ira Glass
Who were murdered.
- [51:31]
Nancy Updike
Okay, so they were ghosts.
- [51:33]
Ira Glass
I guess I need to see it again.
- [51:35]
Nancy Updike
And they. They say, come play with us, Danny.
- [51:39]
Seth Lynn
Come play with us, Danny.
- [51:41]
Nancy Updike
Come play with us forever.
- [51:43]
Joel Lovell
Forever.
- [51:47]
Denise
And ever.
- [51:50]
Mike Birbiglia
And ever. I love how your mom's take on this is. It's. It's so not deeply sinister, this film.
- [51:58]
Nancy Updike
There was a little girl. Didn't he have a friend? Playmate? It's not fair for me to expect that someone would have the same relationship to it as me. Feeling like I kind of lived inside of it in a really terrible way.
- [52:15]
Mike Birbiglia
For two years.
- [52:15]
Nancy Updike
For two years.
- [52:16]
Ira Glass
My most intense memory of the after.
- [52:19]
Joel Lovell
Effects of all that is that I'd.
- [52:22]
Ira Glass
Wake up in the morning and you'd be sleeping on the floor, on the rug, beside the bed, all curled up in your. Your quilt.
- [52:28]
Nancy Updike
I just remember. I remember going to my room during the day and I would look at my bedroom and sort of prove to myself that it wasn't scary during the day and because I'd say, okay, it's light out. This is exactly what it looks like at night. It's just dark. There's nothing different about it. But I would get this sort of dread as the day went on.
- [52:51]
Ira Glass
And I don't remember that you shared.
- [52:52]
Joel Lovell
Any of that at all.
- [52:53]
Nancy Updike
I don't think I shared any of it.
- [52:54]
Ira Glass
I. I mean, to everyone else and throughout your growing up, I mean, you were to all outward appearances a really joyful, happy child, really loving, and yet it just really shows that children have very involved inner lives that their parents might not know much about.
- [53:12]
Nancy Updike
Yeah.
- [53:14]
Mike Birbiglia
And why didn't you ask for help?
- [53:17]
Nancy Updike
I didn't think that anyone could help. The message of the movie is, no one's gonna help you, little kid.
- [53:27]
Mike Birbiglia
The parents in the film just aren't any help to the kid. Like, your parents aren't gonna help you.
- [53:30]
Nancy Updike
Right. The father in the movie is trying to kill you. The mother wants to save you, but can't. You have to save yourself.
- [53:37]
Mike Birbiglia
Do you think one of the reasons why you didn't ask for help was because it was. It's like, because it had affected your dreams? Do you know what I mean? Like, in a way, it had gotten to a part of you where nobody can go anyway but you.
- [53:50]
Nancy Updike
Right. There's a certain point where the person who is trying to help you is going to go to sleep. And I would be left alone. Everyone sleeps alone.
- [54:04]
Mike Birbiglia
Seth Lind, he's our program's director of operations.
- [54:09]
Carol Kane
I do not have any memory of peaceful sleep. Feels like I read about it in a novel.
- [54:14]
Seth Lynn
I believe that all the little secrets.
- [54:16]
Carol Kane
People keep when you drop your garden.
- [54:18]
Seth Lynn
Slumber they come out in front.
- [54:20]
Carol Kane
I crush to sleep for nothing I'm.
- [54:22]
Mike Birbiglia
Left to beat a little taste of the big sleep. So I started today's show by talking about how fear of sleeping for me goes hand in hand with the fear of death. And I used to be surprised that everybody didn't feel that way or regularly have that experience. These moments in bed when they felt so aware that death is really gonna happen to them. And I have found that it is comforting that there are other people who do feel that. Here are some.
- [54:51]
Ira Glass
I will be totally asleep and it'll be at about three or four o'.
- [54:56]
Joel Lovell
Clock in the morning, I'll just bolt.
- [54:58]
Ira Glass
Upright and I'm like.
- [55:00]
Seth Lynn
Then it's like a complete instant panic attack where I'm just like clutching the.
- [55:05]
Joel Lovell
Sheets and going, oh, God, Oh God, oh no. Oh God, oh no. And I'll Just kind of hang onto the bed and be like, no, no.
- [55:11]
Ira Glass
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- [55:12]
Joel Lovell
And I' you're cornered.
- [55:15]
Seth Lynn
You're a trapped animal who's like, you know, sweating and waiting for its head.
- [55:20]
Joel Lovell
To be chopped off.
- [55:21]
Seth Lynn
I can feel time whizzing by, and I'm trying to hold on to something generally.
- [55:26]
Joel Lovell
So I usually start grabbing the walls.
- [55:28]
Seth Lynn
Or, like, clinging to the pillow, and I'm like, this isn't gonna go away. I need to hold this.
- [55:32]
Joel Lovell
I need to hold on to time. I need to stand in this river and just not move. Like, it's a kind of very primitive feeling. You have to flee from this totally horrible thing that's happening to you.
- [55:40]
Seth Lynn
But there is nowhere you can flee and understanding at the same time that what you're fleeing and trying to run.
- [55:46]
Joel Lovell
Away from is the complete cessation of you.
- [55:50]
Seth Lynn
Like, normally, I think you go through the day and you don't think. You don't really think you're gonna die or. It seems comforting.
- [55:56]
Joel Lovell
Like, I'm in traffic this morning.
- [55:58]
Seth Lynn
I think, oh, I might die someday. I'm like, oh, what a relief.
- [56:00]
Joel Lovell
Don't have to do this anymore.
- [56:02]
Seth Lynn
But there's something about being half asleep, specifically, that causes the realization to actually die, take effect.
- [56:09]
Ira Glass
When this wakes me up in the middle of the night, it's because I'm right. Like, it's going to happen.
- [56:15]
Joel Lovell
That's why.
- [56:16]
Ira Glass
Because that's reality. And, like, I just. For some reason, I can see it.
- [56:20]
Seth Lynn
It's not an irrational fear.
- [56:22]
Joel Lovell
You really just. It's like, you understand that you're immortal. Your life is going to be over at some point.
- [56:27]
Seth Lynn
You're fighting like, the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed, you know, rolling around in your sheet covers in your blankets. And you're rolling around there trying to fight death, and there's no way you can win.
- [56:42]
Ira Glass
I cry and I just get really sad.
- [56:45]
Joel Lovell
And I just think.
- [56:47]
Ira Glass
I try to breathe, you know, I breathe really deeply, and I just think, like, there's nothing I can do, you.
- [56:54]
Joel Lovell
Know, like, the terror is overtaken by just sad sadness.
- [57:02]
Ira Glass
I just want it to not be true.
- [57:12]
Mike Birbiglia
Jane Marie, Leonard Davis and G.J. echternkamp. I know that we almost never have poems on our show, and I already read one poem today, so, you know, whatever. But there's a Philip Larkin poem that is exactly about this subject that we're talking about. It's in his Collected Poems, which is published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, called Obad. And it begins and it's nighttime and he writes at nighttime. He can see what's always been there. Unresting death a whole day nearer now and then. I'm just going to pick up in the middle of this where he describes what he sees. The total emptiness forever, the sure extinction that we travel to that shall be lost in always. Not to be here, not to be anywhere. And soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid. No trick dispels religion used to try that vast moth eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die. And specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing. It will not feel, not seeing that this is what we fear. No sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell. Nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with the anesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, a small unfocused blur, a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen. This one will and realization of it rages out in furnace fear. When we're caught without people or drink, Courage is no good. It means not scaring others. Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different wined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe. What we know, have always known, know that we can't escape yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch getting ready to ring in locked up offices and all the uncaring intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen, like doctors go from house to house.
- [59:38]
Seth Lynn
While you were sleeping, your babies grew. The stars shined and the shadows moved. Time flew. The phone rang, There was a silence when the kitchen sang its songs.
- [59:58]
Mike Birbiglia
We're program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Jay Marie, Lisa Pollack, Robin, Sarah Semian and Alyssa Shipp. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from PJ Vogt and Tara Kuda. Help on today's rerun from Michael Comedy, Stone Nelson, Catherine Raimondo, Ryan Rummery and Angelo Gervasi. Mike Rubiglia, who you heard earlier in the show, has his own podcast called Working it out. And our latest bonus episode for Life Partners is his latest episode of his podcast where I am the guest and he critiques my skills as a stand up comedian. If you want to become a life partner and get access to all of our bonus episodes. There are so many now. Go to thisamericanlife.org LifePartners this American Life is delivered to public radio stations by prx, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co founder, Mr. Tory Malatea, who explains why he shows up for work sometimes with no shirt, torn pants, no shoes. This way.
- [60:53]
Seth Lynn
I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk. I'm the Hulk.
- [60:56]
Mike Birbiglia
I'm Aaron Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.
- [61:00]
Seth Lynn
While you were sleeping, the money died, machines were harmless and the earth sighed the wind you swept sound and gravity.
- [61:18]
Mike Birbiglia
Next week on the podcast of this American Life. We Sha was out of a job when she started making wigs for pets. She decided this is gonna be my thing, which worked. He said, okay, let me see him and I put him on the desk. The first thing he said was great, I'd like to place an order. Let's launch at Halloween. That good news turned out to be not entirely good news. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio. Stat Foreign this message comes from Schwab.
- [61:55]
Joel Lovell
At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs.
- [61:59]
Mike Birbiglia
That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and.
- [62:14]
Joel Lovell
Transparent advice, you can manage your wealth.
- [62:16]
Mike Birbiglia
Using your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.