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.

The Sleep-Lust Parabasis

Dagwood's effrontery to "work" and its participle "product" (mown lawn) suggest an alternative to the vilification of sleep-lust as "play."

Whether or not we are willing to openly admit it, sleep becomes social capital the second we hit high school. The structure of social functions allows for braggadocio surrounding both the limitation and the indulgence of sleep. Whereas sleep on the one hand is a sign of bourgeois privilege and laziness it is alternatively a symbol of class struggle and rebellion. Sleep is both the limiting liminal structure of economic hierarchy and the means by which such a hierarchy is in theory attacked. To understand the paradox I am attempting to illuminate, consider that it is appropriate to bemoan the lack of sleep one gets at night whilst crediting one’s ability to sleep through lectures, meetings, etc. To this end, the yawn is in itself totemic of both ends of scapegoating structures in a cyclical sense. A yawn is challenge during the day, surrender during the night.

To the individual existing without the collective boundaries of hegemonic sleep social customs, sleep is still an object of desire made taboo by repetition of the cultural construction of “sloth”; the realization of communal fear concerning what the indulgence of sleep-lust may cost the continuity of human relations. In this animated opposition of good and bad, the holy office belongs to "work"—-not intended in the scientific sense—-but as a whole; itself attached to some ethereal notion of "product" that will only come about through an oblique exertion. Although this "product" may at times be represented in something expressly palpable (such as a mown lawn), the existence of the “product” is entirely arbitrary in that any perceived advantages of its advent demand to be immediately forgotten in lieu of the establishment of a new and more demanding “product.” Should any “product” bring with it the actual promised satisfaction its presence claims the aforementioned satisfaction would prove conclusive the core lubricious nature of “work.” In this scenario—-admittedly impossible—-understanding of “sloth” would be put into question, our damning of sleep-lust with it.

Therefore, the position of sleep in our waking subconscious understanding reflects the complexity of our physical actions in sleep. Our maneuvering with sleep in conscious hours sculpts our feelings towards ourselves in our sleeping moments. Traditional dream analysis fails to comprehend how our collective attitude towards sleep must be understood in order to approximate any psychological claims on our dreams, themselves property of our sleep-lust. The most telling evidence of this relationship is our intriguing and indulgent habit of physically acting out the dealings of our waking moments in sleep. To this end, if you throw food-lust into the mix, you are served one of the more compelling and complicit phenomena one can hope to examine.