Food Order

Four months have passed since my first nocturnal feasting and I haven't been able to track a palatable pattern or system to their visits. My instinct was to look at my diet, mainly what I had ingested the evenings of my stirrings. But it doesn't matter any if I've had none to drink or quite a lot, nor does it matter if I went to bed hungry or stuffed to the brim. The cause of my sleeping appetencies must not be triggered by what (or the lack of what) I've consumed during the day. By and large what I've eaten during my sleep has been sweets--besides the shrimp from the other night. But nothing I've consumed reflects the cravings I have for mass quantities of food during the day; those cravings are almost always confined to the red-meat and potato side-dish variety.

The only commonality I can find in every case of my sleep-eating is the good or fulfilling day I'd had before the intermission of bedded sleep. Once a friend took me out drinking and desserting, on another occasion Mom let me order three entrées at The Horse Brass, and last week the Martin Lawrence look-a-like (who I hate) got kicked off of ANTM.

I made the shrimp the night I was taken out, my mom gave me chocolates the same night I ordered 3 dinners, and on the night of Stacey Ann Lawrence’s departure my roommate was eating Ninja Turtle fruit snacks. Maybe here would be a good place to mention the 3 things which make me the most happy: attention, excess, and the pain of others. My nighttime excursions to the kitchen are an acting out or emergence of Lacan's "objet petits a" or partial objects. In other words, I crave or desire not what I'm eating, but rather what those foods reference. What I sleep eat is a symptom of my desire, rather than the actual desire. While coming down off of the high a special evening, I seek out, as Zizek puts it, "the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation".

Not quite Proust’s auxiliary motives, but close. Think about that scene in 8 ½ when Guido sees the hotel owner’s thighs and remembers Saraghina. This is a perfect example of an “objet petit”. What sleep-eating is, or what I'm attempting to achieve when I eat unconsciously, is to re-enter the state of satisfaction I recently experienced.