Alarming
I sleep like the dead. I can fall asleep just about anywhere and sleep through pretty much any noise. This has been my way for as long as I can remember and I consider it a gift. Light, sound, smells - nothing that exists in nature really has the power to wake me up, except for my mother.
Throughout my years at home it was standard practice for my mother to wake me up. Every morning she stood in my doorway screeching at me that if I didn’t get up right now I was going to miss the bus and she was NOT going to drive me to school. She’d lie to me about what time it was, saying it was quarter after six. I’d look at the clock to see it was only 6:07 and roll over to go back to sleep for another eight minutes. Resistance is futile when my mother is waking you up and eventually I’d surrender to her distress and drag myself out of bed to make the threatening screeches cease. Both of us would go into our days none too happy, but such was our daily dance.
Observing this on the daily must have frustrated my stepfather, Terry, because one year on my birthday I received a clock radio. It was a fancy one. You didn’t have to set the time yourself; all you had to do was plug in the clock and it linked with a satellite or aliens or the Holy Spirit and automatically set the time. I’m not sure how the thing worked, but somehow it knew what time it was. All you had to do was set the alarms. You selected the time, set it for AM or PM, and then picked the option for the sound that would blare at the assigned time. As I remember there were two options: the regular radio would come on or you could set it to a piercing sound that was very like the warning sound a truck makes when backing up. I went with the truck backing up noise, figuring that the radio would never wake me up.
Turns out the sound of a giant truck backing up next to my head also didn’t wake me up. The first time I used the alarm clock I remember waking up to Terry standing in my doorway saying something like, “It is too early for this much noise, TURN OFF THE ALARM.” Being the bratty asshole that I was I thought to myself, “why did you give me the damn thing if you didn’t want me to use it?!?” I pouted about the whole thing for awhile and let myself feel indignant, but I was not eager to repeat that interaction. I love Terry, but he’s scary when he’s angry. (Usually because he’s right when he’s angry so it’s kind of like, “oh shit, I’m about to get my ass verbally handed to me and I totally deserve it but I am very scared”.) I think I tried using the alarm clock one or two more times with no better results. I would hear it and turn it off quickly the voice of disappointment, but then would promptly go back to sleep. In the end my mother still had to wake me up as it was the only reliable way to roust me.
For some reason my mother decided not to go to college with me to attend to my every whim, which I thought was weird. Without her there, I quickly found that I had to figure out how to get myself out of bed on time to make it to class. This was rough going and I slept through a number of classes that started before 11 am. About a month into my first semester I slept through a quiz which was a not insignificant part of the final grade. When I reached out to the professor about possible making up the quiz she let me know in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t just reschedule things to suit myself. The syllabus was established and was to be followed. In short, I needed to get my butt to class.
Ashamed and embarrassed at having been told off by a professor, especially when I was used to teachers liking me, I became paranoid about oversleeping. I had to figure out how to hear my alarm and wake up on time. Each night I would go to bed hideously worried that I would oversleep. Each night I slept poorly and woke several times to check the clock before morning finally came and I could head off to class exhausted, but on time.
To this day every time I have to wake up earlier than usual, I have to play this little psychological game with myself to ensure that I actually wake up.
“You have to hear the alarm,” I say. “You have to wake up at five-thirty. You have to hear the alarm.” Over and over again I repeat it in my head. This allows me to fall asleep with a slightly elevated level of anxiety which makes it so I actually hear the alarm in the morning.
It also makes a number of other things happen. One time when I was working retail I had a very early shift that I was paranoid about sleeping through. I went to bed chanting my “you must wake up” mantra. In the morning I woke up the moment my phone made a noise. Without stopping to look at the time, I hopped in the shower and got dressed for work. When I picked up my phone to leave, I was shocked to find that it was only 3:30 am, a full four hours before I needed to leave for my job. Wide awake from my shower and certain that I’d never wake up on time if I went back to sleep, I decided to just sit in my bedroom and read until it was time to go to work. And that is the story of how I started reading To Kill A Mockingbird.
Most often what happens is I find myself in a vivid dream. In the dream I am somewhere that is supposed to be quiet: I’m sitting in a theater watching a play or standing in front of a crowd giving an important presentation. Whatever the setting, the plot of the dream is always the same. I begin to hear this annoying, repetitive sound. I find the source of the sound, usually my phone or a radio or some other piece of technology, and I try to turn it off. Finding the power button I press and press and nothing happens. The noise continues. I begin to get frustrated. The strong desire to smash the source of the noise arises, but even when I do smash it, the noise persists. This continues until I’m frustrated to the point of tears, screaming in the dream, “WHY CAN’T I TURN THIS THING OFF?!?”
At which point I wake up and realize that the whole time it was my alarm going off in real life and my brain had been trying to wake me up by pissing me off via dream. Another great way to start the day, let me tell you.
The other day I had to get up early to go into work on a Saturday for an event. The night before I went to bed early, chanting like a monk: “Om Mani Padme Um…you HAVE to hear your alarm…Om Mani Padme Um…wake up at 6:00 you dumbass.” This time I successfully woke up without any drama and made it to the office earlier than planned. By mid morning I was sitting in a worship service in charge of running the slides for music and liturgy. As I sat listening to the sermon, I heard a familiar sound. Distant, as if coming from another room, but still clear as day, it was the ubiquitous sound of the iPhone alarm: the sound I wake up to every morning.
No one in the room made any move to go silence their phone. No one seemed to recognize the alarm as their own. We all just sat there and continued to listen. The sermon was engaging, but the longer the alarm continued to go off the more I began to wonder if I was really sitting there. Did I actually wake up on time, or had the whole morning been a very vivid dream? Did I merely think I was at work, but in reality was still at home in bed, oversleeping and letting down everyone depending on me for this event?
The alarm continued going off and my palms began to sweat. How could I figure out what was real or a dream? Subtly I pinched myself on the arm and nothing happened. Did that mean I really was awake, or was that the sensation of the cat biting me in real life trying to wake me up? I started trying to recall the plot of the movie Inception, trying to remember how they could tell if they were in real life or a dream.
Before I could start reenacting the movie, the alarm stopped. My heart rate slowed. That never happens in the dream. In the dreams the sound continues incessantly until I wake up, so this must be real. Just as I started relaxing, the alarm started sounding a second time. Quickly I went to pinch my arm, harder this time, but before I got a grip on my skin the alarm stopped. I relaxed again, realizing that it had been coming from someone in the other room the whole time. I was awake and had made it to work on time.
Occasionally when I am awake my mind wanders until I am off in this nebulous nothingness where I believe that nothing is real, not even myself. I am just a consciousness floating in the dark, seeing nothing and knowing no one. Earth, people, my own body, life is not real. They do not exist. There is just the dark and my thoughts, and I’m not sure that they are real either. When I am zoned out in this place of nothingness my brain presents images to me: things that I would recognize in the plane of existence where I am Megan McKay and I have a life and family and friends. I see a house I lived in, a school I went to, a field I drive by a lot, and while I recognize these images for what they are, I do not recognize them as having any significance to me. Because in the nothingness I am not me and none of these things are real.
“But,” says my brain, “something must be real. Because you are here and conscious and these images are coming from somewhere. It must be from your life.” And so I think and try to remember. “There is such a thing as people,” I think. “Remember one.” And I think and think and images rush through my mind until we land on the one that can always roust me; the one person who can always wake me up: my mother. I see the image of her in my mind and immediately recognize her. Suddenly can I make the connections to all the other images. That’s the house we lived in when I was 12, that’s where we went on vacation that one time, that is last Christmas. And so on and so on until I am back. I am no longer zoned out but am sitting at my desk or standing in the shower, wherever I was when my mind start to wonder. Everything is real again and I slip right back into place in this life that I know and recognize and believe to be real.
Not being able to tell for sure if I was asleep or awake freaked me out. The concept of what is real seems harder to grasp following that waking nightmare the other day. “Am I awake?” becomes “Is any of this real” far more quickly than I am comfortable acknowledging. But there are touchstones that can keep me grounded: things that I know to be true.
1) I know that alarm clocks do not wake me up unless I talk myself into it the night before.
2) The human brain is weird and mysterious, which probably accounts for the existential crisis of zoning out into nothingness.
3) The sight and memory of my mother standing in my bedroom doorway, screeching at me to get out of bed, will forever be a treasured image in my mind. Not only because it’s kind of funny, but because it seems that Mom is a talisman of sorts. Her image grounds me in this reality that she birthed me into, a reality that she’d really like me to engage with if only I would wake up and get out of bed.
