In that Sleep of Death What Treats May Come

Alas, poor Yorrick. I ate him, Horatio.

We’ve already discussed the desire for sleep in a blog previously posted titled “The Sleep-Lust Parabasis.” If anyone needs a refresher I suggest you go ahead and click on that in order that you may marvel at the proscribed role sleep-lust plays in our society. Furthermore, if you think I made up the word “Parabasis” just because your Mozilla browser doesn’t recognize it, I suggest you go find a copy of the fucking OED and educate yourself as to the viability of that particular word. As for you, Mozilla spell-check dictionary: You’re on my list.

The original plan was that I would post a “Food-Lust Denouement” in order that the two could be inexorably linked and their oblique concurrences illuminated for all to see. Unfortunately, I found the subject far too embarrassing and personal. Food-lust is not just a phenomenon; it is the defining phenomenon of my American generation. As much as we like to believe we relate to one another through our ridiculously arbitrary musical tastes and director preferences, it’s all so disgustingly similar it gets to the point it makes me want to throw up in your face. I get it, you really like Wilco but you didn’t like the latest Wes Anderson film. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF.

Memo to everyone: Go fuck yourselves.

The truth is it is through our relation to food that we learn and discriminate the most. Those with a hatred for a specific race are antiquated mummies when compared to the growing fascination with body size and food intake. As fast as people are growing to despise the hefties among us these selfsame hefties are circumscribing their food-lust in the language of disease (!!!). Food-lust is not looked upon with the inauspicious gaze of those who glance on sleep-lust so inertly. The hateful gaze directed towards food-lust is as active and baleful as punching a hefty right in his/her jiggling fat-pouch.

It is interesting, then, that in the case of a clinical diagnosis of sleep-eating a doctor would so openly accept that food- and sleep-lust are intimately connected, claiming, “I think two instinctual behaviors become intertwined.”

But my case for the separation between the two lusts (and the holy post our relation to food maintains) is in the fact that those afflicted with Ambien-caused sleep-eating “realize they have an eating problem but do not associate it with…sleeping.” The lust for food is a “problem,” yet the lust for sleep is so benign they march their swollen ankles dutifully to the pharmacy to refill their tranquilizers in order that they may further clog their gullets with the silky-smooth embrace of JIF and Skippy as their horrified teenage sons look on. In horror.

This leads us to perhaps the most telling revelation of the article, that “abnormal behaviors [read: sleep-eating] like those could be unmasked in a small minority of patients taking any [sleep] medications.” In other words, perhaps those who are insomniacs are by nature the most likely to sleep eat.

When I began my foray into the realm of sleepy-time munching, I was in fact suffering from insomnia. I spent (spend) the nights consumed in worry until my lower-right eyelid twitched (twitches) uncontrollably. Then I would count the twitches until I fell (fall) asleep. Then I would wander about my childhood house and snack in complete ignorance of my own actions.

The point is, perhaps the same worries that keep us up at night are the transubstantiated forms of our repressed and hated sleep- and food-lust. Maybe the muted muffled voice of our animal past manifests itself in our concerns over our jobs, schooling, and haircuts. Maybe our whole societal structure is intended to limit how our true instincts are expressed. Yes, Derrida, I am plagiarizing your corpse. But in a context you may not have dreamed of and certainly would not approve.

This is why all old men should smoke pipes.

More to come next week, including a discussion of the following:

The first night her son was there, he found her standing in the kitchen, body cast and all, frying bacon and eggs. The next night he found her eating a sandwich, Ms. Evans said, and sent her back to bed. Later that same night, her son arose to find her standing in the kitchen again. "I had turned the oven on," she recalled. "I store pots and pans in the oven and I had turned it to 500 degrees."

Ah, the recognition of my youth…

Naked [Sleeping] Lunch

Just got a hankerin' for a few dozen popsicles and candy bars

The thing about drug-induced sleep eating is that it presents what could be considered a “golden ticket” of the Willy Wonka ilk that promises a lifetime supply of chocolate and definitive contact with a distant animal past. The article makes sure to mention that the drug’s side effect does not cause the usual psychological over-eating that Americans are all too familiar with, but a “primal” need for food that our culture is so foreign to it's ridiculous. This is part of what I identified earlier as the true attraction and joy of sleep-eating; that it in essence connects the advanced desire of symbolism and repetition of our current culture with an indistinguishable animal past.

Admittedly, my time with sleep-eating is most likely over. It was a constant and sticky companion throughout the years of my adolescence. When I found out Death Mask was afflicted with it to this day my initial and continuing reaction was bald envy. Therefore, the prospect of Ambien handing me a potential route by which I could relive the thrill of my somnambulant snacking gave me hope.

There is a problem, though, and that is the way that the “side-effect” of this drug is causing unbelievable weight gain. As the article claims, some woman in SoCal gained one hundred motherfucking pounds by sleep-eating candy bars and popsicles. Furthermore there were concerns that those who were sleep-eating would “choke” themselves in the process. This is not the re-enactment of awake eating that I remember so fondly, this is the action of a dog who destroys a rat trap and eats over three pounds of poisonous fucking rat bait because she is too stupid to know the shit will kill her. As Joseph K. exclaims at the end of Kafka’s The Trial, “Like a dog!”

This dog is so fucking stupid

The point is, perhaps the balance of modern to primal eating instincts when spurred by the drug tips heavily towards “primal,” making those foraging forays into the pantry a tipsy trip up the trunk of a prehistoric family tree. While this phenomenon may be just as interesting as the variation of sleep-eating we’ve been discussing up to this point, it is trivialized by the fact that it lacks a context in our society. I think the sleeping consumption of meticulously breaded shrimp preserved specifically for lunch in a Ziploc bag, or the unconscious preparation and consumption of a toasted PB&J resonate more clearly in the 21st century than the blind desperation involved in eating an entire bag of flour at 3 a.m. while your horrified teenage son looks on. In horror.

Coming Friday: Part 2, including interpretation of the following:

No cause has been found for sleep-related eating disorder, but Dr. Schenck says he believed that it happened when the brain confuses two basic instincts: sleeping and eating. "Those two become linked," he said. "In the sleep stage you eat. I think two instinctual behaviors become intertwined."

It's almost like there's an echo in here.

Penguins Feed their Young

I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE...after you spit it out.

The previous post raises the question that at heart I have been trying to dance around. That is, the context in which sleep-eating becomes more than a popular cultural phenomenon sweeping the nation and instead a subject for silent contemplation and the ever-further furrowing of my permanently furrowed brows.

Take, for example, a young JJ Rousseau rolling around in Mme. de Warrens’ bed like a dog scenting himself in the carcass of a jellyfish on the beach. The irony of Rousseau’s most amusing confession of the Confessions is that at the height of his effervescence his lust demands mediation—-even at its climax the participle orgasm is nothing more than the joy of watching a woman read a letter. The point is that as the romance loses its intensity--as Rousseau ages--the propensity towards actual physical contact increases. In other words, our sex drives work in counter to our capacity to love violently. Happy Anniversary.

Jean-Jacques also gives us the memorable episode in which his ebullient adolescent passions grow closest to the realm of the sensual; and unsurprisingly (for this blog, anyway) the moment is centered on a piece of food:

Sometimes even in her presence I committed extravagances that only the most violent love seemed capable of inspiring. One day at table, just as she had put a piece of food into her mouth, I exclaimed that I saw a hair on it. She put the morsel back on her plate; I eagerly seized and swallowed it. (Rousseau, Confessions)

The opportunity for interpretation is so large here I almost get dizzy trying to start. Of course, most want to wink and mention "Mamon," Mme. de Warrens’ maternal nickname. Most of these people are into role-playing anyway and should not be taken seriously. What I find most interesting is the transmutation of the desire for survival (food) into the desire for intimacy (sex): food and sex are often comingled but infrequently without the inane winking of the role-players mentioned above.


This man wiped his ass with silk laced doilies.

And since Proust was already brought up and my coexistent desires to prove I have read him and weigh in cannot be contained, I find it prudent to mention the transmutation of desire is the same in Swann’s Way as it is in Confessions; yet the addition of the desire for sleep rewrites the whole equation. We are taken from the precocious desire for intimacy that causes insomnia in a child whose imagination cannot withstand the knowledge that his mother is among strangers to the practically blasphemous transubstantiation of cookie (note the inherent difference between pastry and wafer) to pre-pubescent girlfriend.

All of these examples are pointing to T.S. Elliot’s notions of the “objective correlative,” or the object that is more than its physical presence. The half-chewed morsel, the Madeline, the shiny packet of ninja turtle gummies—-all these present evidence both of the mutated role of food in our consciousness and the conscious acceptance of symbolism. Storytelling is affirmed in our very ability to express ourselves better through metaphoric memories than in our own invented languages.*

But here’s my final question: what if our nameless narrator had thought about his infantile infatuation, actually fallen asleep, and then sought out the madelines in his unconsciousness? What if li’l Jean-Jacques had grasped the morsel from Mamon’s mouth, hid it under a stack of magazines, fell asleep, and then devoured it in his dreaming state? Would that not constitute an affirmation that symbolism is not just a necessity in the society of man, but a natural state contained by the structure of human society?

Enough with the erudition for now. I’m coming back big time with a post on that Ambien article I put up a while back.

*Vico would argue that language comes into place only once storytelling is established, that in fact the natural urge towards storytelling (myth) makes language inevitable rather than vice-versa.

Elitism and PBJ

The thought of Peanut Butter and Jelly in a sexual relationship kind of makes my stomach turn

The greatest and most interesting feat in my personal history of sleep eating was constructing and devouring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while completely zonked out. The fact that I cannot remember this event, and that the only evidence I have to support its accuracy is eyewitness accounts and the uneaten quarter sandwich presented to me by the eyewitnesses, makes it no less miraculous in my mind. Firstly, how did I know which jars in the refrigerator were Peanut Butter and Jelly? Was I not just as likely to make a Mayonnaise and Jelly sandwich? Thought provoking, to say the least.

Finally, though, the piece de la resistance, so to speak, was the fact that the bread was toasted. Now, I don’t want to embarrass myself more than I have already, but when I’m awake I never toast the bread for PBJ. Why? Simple: because I’m fucking lazy as shit, that’s why. When I want PBJ it’s because I’m starving and don’t have time for the frills of toasted bread. That kind of superfluous horseshit is for stuffed-shirt types.

This begs the question: am I more patient in my sleep? Am I more of an elitist?

Here’s a link to an article about Ambien and sleep-eating. But don’t think this won’t come up again. In a big fucking way. There’s a lot left unsaid.