The Night is its Own Planet

and no country for hysterical women.

It is the dead of night and I am lying on my back with a stomach full of oat milk and cinnamon toast crunch urgently writing this essay on my Notes app. The phone screen hovering above my third eye is on full brightness and I am in my underwear. 

I also have hiccups. 

You are all unconscious. Probably doing something basic like R.E.M or conserving energy. We are not the same. 

A hiccuping woman alone and awake at 3.40am in Garfield, Texas, is a trailblazer. A warrior. Ungovernable. 

As a diurnal animal, the night is not my domain. I am a foreigner in a strange land four times over; sleeping at someone else’s house, in someone’s else’s state, in someone else’s country, and now - in someone else’s time. I am not supposed to be here, and yet, here I am.

I am MIA. Off the map. I am that bit in Everything Everywhere All At Once where her mind splinters into a billion pieces and fractures across the multiverse. I am riffing. Improvising. Innovating. I am Dylan Goes Electric! I am literally reinventing what and when it means to be conscious. 

I have hot dogs for fingers. 

I am quite mad.

The mournful sound of a train’s horn wails in the distance. I hiccup for the 800th time and release a scream that reaches the deepest bowels of hell except that it is a silent inner-mind scream so as to not wake the dog.

---

If you know me well, or have had a conversation with me for longer than fifteen minutes, then you will know all about my sleep issues. I am a panda bear of sleep; conditions must be exactly right for me to fall unconscious and even then, there’s still no guarantee I will succumb. 

I like a soft-firm mattress and at least seven pillows arranged strategically around my delicate body to support my legs, hips, neck, wrists, and lower back. The room must be kept at whatever temperature allows me to be half in and half out of the covers, then a little cooler than that for the times I have to hide under the duvet when I think a ghoul has touched my leg. It must be completely quiet and entirely dark but not so quiet I think I’ve gone deaf, or so dark that I think I have died.

This means that I am awake for 75% of my life and my biological age is 103. If it wasn't for my overactive imagination it would be utterly boring but, luckily, I keep myself occupied with interesting thought-experiments like, “Where is my birth certificate?” or “Would I rather the ghost of a small Victorian child or a live human man be watching me from the closet?” I stay alert and hypervigilant by listening with my superhuman hearing for burglars cutting perfectly round holes in window panes. I occupy myself for hours having fake arguments with colleagues from jobs I left years ago. I berate myself for not having personally done more to prevent the horrors in the Middle East. 

It is a lonely way to be and a cross I bear horribly, noisily, and without grace. If we’re sharing a bed or a hotel room and you fall asleep before me, just know that I feel utterly abandoned, I’m not happy for you, and I do love you less.

The crazy thing is, put me behind the wheel of a car for ten minutes and my head will be lolling and flopping like I’ve been shot with a tranquilizer dart. 

And before you start offering sleep hygiene tips - please, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. I laugh along to sleep meditation tapes, I eat melatonin for breakfast! 

I have been like this all my life, all over the world, lying awake in the dark at the ungodliest of hours, an intrepid and unconsenting explorer of THE NIGHT.

In Flagstaff, Arizona, the night before I had to get up early to drive to the Grand Canyon, I was kept awake for hours by an unmappable cosmos of motel sounds; a hum of humans just out of reach. A woman with a laugh like a broken kazoo. The uneven stomps and excited squeals of a child who should be in bed. “Silent” doors doing their best to exhale and wheeze shut every time someone entered the hallway. A woman coming to climax while her lover shushed her. And the cross-speak of multiple television sets. I assumed they weren’t all in the same room, but then, what’s a room? All we have are pockets of air next to each other in ever so slightly different splinters of the same dimension, time-zone, coordinates, and airspace. We are all swimming in the same present-day reality soup. 

The climaxing woman’s gasps felt right next to me because they were. Had there been a small hole in the wall I could've offered her words of encouragement ( even without the hole she would have heard me) “You’ve got this! Almost there! Bring it home! Would you like to hold my hand? Here, reach through this hole!” #WomenSupportingWomen

Just one of these motel sounds would have been enough to keep me awake, tossing and hissing until 3am. And the longer I’m kept up, the more insane and unreasonable I become.

There is no one more impotent and insufferable than a British person being inconvenienced, especially at night. The rules of decorum that make us swivel-eyed loons when broken are the same rules keeping us pinned to the bed, head thrashing from side-to-side, periodically blurting out “Unbelievable!”at a volume only loud enough to wind ourselves up, doing absolutely nothing to change our situation. To be fair to me, the other reason I don’t knock on a stranger’s motel room door late at night is that I’ve got a thing about not being shot in the head.

By day, I am a relatively sane, reasonable woman. But after sundown, my mind is not my own. I become possessed; a vessel for ailments, neuroses, and syndromes, prone to whatever the night equivalent of the bends is. In fact, of the numerous symptoms of the bends - “headaches, confusion, itchy skin, muscle weakness, strange behavior, paralysis” - the only one I don’t get is “loss of consciousness”.

Most nights start with me initially descending into a short and fitful hypnagogic state before waking up gasping for air, utterly consumed by The Dread. It is as if it has suddenly occurred to my subconscious that I should be terrified and, once awake, it’s up to my conscious mind to find evidence for why. The answer usually comes in the form of an embarrassing memory from six years ago, any information coming out of Gaza, or a nearby sound.

Nighttime is the place where sounds are most potent, generative, and dangerous.

In New York City there are millions of terrifying night sounds. Screams, sirens, gunshots, rats scratching, cars revving, couples fighting - empirically, all of these noises are scary, they do not signal anything good. But they are so numerous and so frequent that they sort of cancel each other out. There is nothing more New York than simply not having the time to be terrified by all the terrifying things.

But in the countryside it’s different. There’s lots of space to be invaded, lots of darkness to hide in, and lots of silence to be broken.

The more wholesome or innocuous the noise by day, the more horrifying to hear it at night; a polite knock on the door, a slow moving truck creeping up a gravel driveway, the radio turning on (any kind of music), a boat’s oar slapping the water, and children’s laughter. In daylight these noises are unremarkable, pleasant even, the sound design of a summer’s day. But in the depth of darkness when you are alone, lying still under a thin blanket, they take on strange, foreboding qualities.

I recently read Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck and was comforted to know that even a 6ft tall white man living in the 1960s, a species with no natural predators, could be reduced to a quivering wreck by rain after 10pm:

The rain drummed on the metal roof. The darkness fell and the trees moved closer. Over the rain drums I seemed to hear voices, as though a crowd of people muttered and mumbled offstage. I succumbed utterly to my desolation. Then the rain stopped falling and the trees dripped and it helped to spawn a school of secret dangers. Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

I had always suspected I was like Steinbeck, I just assumed it was because of the writing stuff.

So, it was surprising that my sleep was pretty good when I first moved to a remote ranch in Texas in early February. But on the third night, my brain caught up to my surroundings and sounded the alarm, reminding me that mine was the first accessible bedroom in a one-story building on grounds populated by strangers living out of camper vans and one thick-set ginger cat, Dennis, who is able to open the front door by throwing his full body at it. When he can’t get in he simply tries the handle over and over again like a deranged stalker in a bad horror movie. I’m regularly woken by the repetitive twang of the handle being flicked down by his giant paw.

At least, I think it’s him.

Dennis is one of about eight cats who live on the property, some feral, some domesticated, all of whom nonchalantly pass each other by day, but fight mortal combat by night. The only way to describe the sounds emanating from the backs of their throats is operatic fury. Their screeches have a comical, cartoonish quality while the Texas-state-shaped-cowbell dangling from the tree outside my window punctuates the fighting, “Ding ding ding!” with every round, except in a more laid-back, Texas cowbell way, “Clang, dong, clinga-ling-dong, play nice y’all…”

Every night, as the sun sets, hundreds of heavy, bumbling June bugs swarm the front door, launching themselves at my face and hair whenever I dare to leave or come home. There are also goats, pigs, ducks, chickens, outside dogs, inside dogs, and one donkey who screams at random moments, day and night. Not that there is a non-random or optimum time for donkey screams. When it comes to screaming donkeys, you’re literally never expecting to hear one. A donkey’s bray is one of more tragic animal cries; overwrought, inconsolable, like a new widow hyperventilating through a megaphone.

Some nights at around midnight, Winnie will suddenly sit bolt upright, alerted to the ratta-tat-tat of rapid gunfire happening somewhere in the not so distant distance. We both tune in, is it getting closer or further away? In which direction are they shooting? Why? What kind of person sees the peaceful, late-spring evening simmering with fire flies and cicada and thinks “Yep. I’m gonna have to shoot about 5000 bullets into all that”

And if you’re reading this and thinking, “Katy! Don’t be silly, he’s not randomly shooting in the dark, he’s probably wearing some sort of heat-seeking night-goggles strapped to his head!” - please understand that these added details are literally nightmare fuel.

To say I’m suggestible is an understatement. If you recount a disturbing scene from a horror movie you saw once, that’s pretty much Game Over for me and my sleep for the rest of the month. I never need to see the movie.

There’s an infamous urban legend that has circulated around my friendship group for about fifteen years. It’s been retold by many people, many times, but never better than when it’s told by its originator, Jody Bragger. It goes like this: One evening, Jody’s mum’s, or step-mum’s, or aunty’s mum’s sister’s car broke down on a country road and she was walking towards the lights of a nearby town to find help. As she walked across a field of high grass, she could barely see two feet in front of her. Suddenly, her shin hit something heavy and fleshy on the floor and she fell down. When she looked back at her feet to see what had tripped her, she saw a dark misshapen lump start to move. Then it sprung up and took the shape of an impossibly small man who looked her dead in the eye and said in a nasally goblin voice, “There you are!” before scurrying off into the night.

Jody swears on his life that this happened. It is almost certainly made up. A complete lie. Just a very good, wonderfully silly ghost story.

I’m kept up thinking about it probably three times a year.

There’s a line in the Funkadelic song, Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, that goes “Be careful of the thought-seeds you plant in the garden of your mind”. It is good advice. Because if you’re not careful, the night offers perfect conditions for strange fears to germinate and bloom.

I try to be careful with my garden. I no longer watch horror movies or “True Crime” documentaries (aka: stories exclusively about women being murdered and chopped up). But as a conscious, seeing, feeling person trying to navigate this world in both the real and virtual space, sometimes the seeds of horror are carried on the wind and hit me in the face like June bugs. The news. The environment. My bank balance.

But then, there are times when I throw a grenade into my garden, and honestly, that’s on me.

At the start of my road trip, I stayed in LA for a week with my friend, Ben, in the spare room of his chic Highland Park home “Casa Cacti”. We went for a lovely grown-up dinner at a medium fancy restaurant and talked about sane, grown-up things like sex, real estate, and cholesterol. 

When I climbed into bed later that night, I didn’t feel tired, so I picked up my phone to clock in a solid two hours on Instagram’s “For You” page. Big mistake. Huge. For some reason, what the algorithm thinks is “for me” is Illuminati conspiracies, alien sightings, and shark attack videos; otherwise known as “The Batshit Collection”. After mentally absorbing hundreds of videos ranging from poorly doctored clips of Beyonce as a shape-shifting lizard to an orca pulling its trainer to the bottom of the tank, I thought, “Yes, now it is time. I am now ready to close my eyes and drift into a peaceful slumber…”

Again, let me restate that I am a grown-up. A reasonable woman. I own a business. I have to submit two types of tax returns. I have held down multiple director-level jobs where I have been responsible for the physical and mental well-being and professional development of scores of people. Family and friends seek me out for advice. I am officially sage!

But that night in Los Angeles I experienced a temporary mental derailment. Un petit cerebral inconvenience, if you will. I had been hearing a tiny tapping sound at the window, no doubt a moth hitting the glass or the wood frame expanding in the heat. But as I started to doze, the sound spawned a complex and disturbing apparition. Just as I was about to go under, I opened my eyes to see a glowing globule alien man hunched and creeping into my bedroom window. His leg was over the windowsill. White light was emanating from behind him. The mother ship was waiting to take me away. He was silver and see-through. Did I mention he was a globule? In the shape of a man? The layers of horror! I was petrified. First by the thing I was seeing and then by the sound of a woman’s blood-curdling scream which it took me a second to realize was me.

The whole ordeal lasted about forty seconds which is actually quite a long time for a blood-curdling scream. After the commotion had died down (can it be a commotion if it’s just one woman and a cowering dog?) I heard Ben’s small, unsure voice from the other side of the wall, “….Katy?”

So much said with so few words:

“Katy… are you being murdered and chopped up?”

“Katy… has the ceiling fallen down on your head?”

“Katy… are you having a heart attack (as we discussed, your cholesterol is high)?”

Oh, sweet Ben. How will you ever understand the places I’ve been and the things I have seen? How to explain the hallucinogenic powers of an artist’s mind after two hours on the internet? What to say of the see-through globule man who visits me through your spare bedroom window at night?

To Ben’s credit, he came in to check on me and, seeing how shaken up and embarrassed I was, assured me that I was perfectly safe, both physically and socially. Then we laughed. After the screaming stopped, Oh, how we laughed!

And then we continued to laugh about it at random moments throughout the rest of our week together. It was a great comedy seed, one that hit us when we least expected it and had us dissolving into fits of laughter on a hiking trail, in the car, or on important work calls.

Like Nora Ephron famously said “So, you’ve woken your friends up by screaming about an alien globule man at the window again - it’s all copy, baby!”

It really is that easy for tragedy to become comedy. With the passing of time and the rising of the sun, night becomes day. By morning I have bloomed back into a grown-up and all my fears, terrestrial or extra, are revealed to be small and manageable, or at least visible, which is half the battle.

And I’m comforted to know, thanks to my twin, Nobel Prize-winning author, John Steinbeck, that I’m not the only human who shape shifts in this way:

The sun was up when I awakened and the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of the day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.