Creature of the night in Daydreaming on the Porch

When I can’t chase the stories through the night, they escape and get lost.


Franz Kafka
Diary entry, June 4, 1915


At long last it has come to me. This is what I will write about: the middle of the night. What shall I call it? The “still of the early morining hours?” “The reverential hush of deepest eventide?”

It has been raining off and on for the past hour, a teasing sort of rain that has provided the only sounds out my window as I sit here reading and typing.

Late at night, and in the early morning hours between 2-5, I exist in a kind of in-between realm. I am awake and alert, but ready to shut down and go to bed at any time. But only if I have to.

It’s a quarter to three, and a car has just noisily come to a stop in a parking place, a door has shut, and the spell of an empty, quiet night has just been momentarily broken. But it is now quiet again. Mercifully. There is nothing so obtrusive and annoying as loud cars at this impossibly late hour.

I tell people I am a “creature of the night,” a night person who thrives on staving off sleep so that he can cram in one more hour of reading on his phone, listening to music on YouTube, or organizing or processing photos. Then there are countless books and magazines that need attention. There are never enough hours in the night.

This longterm habit of staying up most of the night is an ongoing one, and has, ironically, enabled me to go to sleep quickly once a certain early-morning hour arrives. Sleeping and dreaming from 5 am to 1 pm has become as familiar, and as comfortable and ritualistic as my morning routines once were at the start of a new day.

When I say that I am a night person, I say that I like the multitude of quiet possibilities that exist — the subtle gradations of mystery and yearning that can only come when there is virtually nothing to interfere with thought and meditation. No places to be. No guilt over staying put on the sofa or in bed.

In winter, there are no cricket and frog sounds. But in summer the little creatures come alive with the sounds of their music. It’s the most comforting, steady and rhythmic sound I know of. It lulls me into deep reverie. There is often no wind to stir the trees. There are just these timeless night sounds of insects and frogs.

Often I go and sit in the rocking chair on my 4th floor balcony at 3 am. I settle into this tiny outdoor sanctuary with its potted geraniums and other hanging flower baskets.I look up at the black sky, hoping there is a large enough moon for clouds to sail in font of, obscuring their light momentarily. If it’s a good night to watch that spectacle, I run inside and get my camera and take a few photos. What a magical sight! This doesn’t occur on many nights, but when it does, the evening tableaux is even more majestic and luminous.

This past week, it hasn’t been as quiet, and I’ve been a bit irritated by a nearby giant bullfrog puffing and bellowing very loudly every 15 or 20 seconds, hour after hour. I go inside sometimes just to get some relief, and I can still hear it. I wonder how on earth a creature such as a frog, admittedly a pretty big one, can utter such loud, foghorn-like sounds. But that’s how it is in the middle of the night. Sound travels.

Yes, I miss the dawns. When I have at last surrendered to the necessity of sleep, I do not get to know the miraculous sunrise colors at the beginning of the day that lies just ahead. Dawn comes and goes, day after day, and I have become a stranger to its presence, aware of it only when I get to sleep after 6 am and it is starting to get light outside my windows, and I sleepily notice the lightening sky even though the blinds are shuttered as tightly as possible.

I don’t think I want to change these routines very much. It’s been eight years of this complete reversal of day and night activity, and sleep. It started when I retired and didn’t have to be at work at 10. My flex-hour workday was 10-6:30. During that time home aides stayed with my mother who was nearing 90, had dementia, and needed everything done for her. My boss understood how difficult mornings could be for a full-time caregiver.

But even during all the years I was working I stayed up late, especially when the Internet started to dominate my life. It was normal for me to get to bed at 2 or 3am and wake up for work at 7:30. I was seldom tired at work and functioned well at my job for many years on 4-5 hours of sleep. In recent years I have come to believe this is due to what is referred to as “the short sleep gene,” which 5 percent of the population has, and that must include. I could sleep 4-5 hours a night/morning now if I wanted to, but I have the luxury these days of sleeping 6-7 hours every morning and early afternoon. Circadian rhythms? Normal nights? What’s all that about?

The late night seems to have no end sometimes, offering a glimpse of immortality, while the time just before dawn is filled with a subtle kind of restlessness, the feeling that the reveries and deep thoughts during the late nights will not last, and that the harsher light of day will soon replace the subtle hints of the sunrise I only briefly observe through the cracks in my window blinds.

Late at night, I experience the feeling of being the only one still awake. The lone holdout. The sentiinel in the night — watchful, listening, tired, but unaware of being tired until the mind starts clamoring for some sort of respite from the world of consciousness. It wants time to itself in the land of dreams and altered reality.

Sleep is precious, blissful, restorative and cleanses the brain. I know that, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to it. If I can get 6-7 hours of fitful sleep full of strange and utterly mystifying dreams, I consider that as normal as I can get.

To those for whom slumber at a normal time is an easeful release from consciousness, savor the gift. Regarding those denizens of the deepest part of night such as myself, who strive to extract every last bit of wakefulness from the deepest and darkest stretch of long evening, be patient and tolerant. We are not more “night owls” — that term is for amateurs - but are instead “denizens of the night” and we yield to its mysteries only with great reluctance, and, finally, sheer exhaustion.

Soothing night sounds

Last updated July 03, 2024