Not being able to sleep: time seems to slow down, then to peter out slowly, eternity takes its place. All the other nights of insomnia come back to haunt me and the sheer load of those empty waking hours that parade in front of my inner eye sometimes seem enough to tip the careful balance of the mind towards insanity.
The house I used to live in in London was built almost entirely of wood and glass. I lived on the top floor in the triangular roof under a skylight and could see the trees in the garden swaying in the wind. On stormy nights the whole house would shake, the wind howling around the corners of my room, weather straight out of 'Wuthering Heights'. But I felt warm and comfortable curled up in my futon while outside the storm would lash the trees and the walls of my little hut.
Those were the romantic stormy nights I loved. But there were others too. The uncanny siblings of the stormy nights were the eerily quiet nights. Prolonged silence is very unusual in London, especially as we were living between Holloway Road and Liverpool Street and there was always a police siren or an ambulance in evidence somewhere. But some nights were different. The silence would slowly trickle into your brain and accumulated there at the threshold of sleep, becoming more ominous as it became longer. Eventually I would open my eyes, not tired and exhausted, but instantly fully awake, ears palpating the surroundings for noise, the senses sharpend and vivified. But none came. And sometimes a single leave would slide down the slating and create a disturbing, unearthly sound, as if somebody would scratch a single nail over the roof. The silence would thicken and become almost liquid. In such nights it was impossible to sleep.
The nights here in residential Western Tokyo are quiet to, but in a rather hushed and considerate way. There is nothing ominous about them. When unable to sleep I can hear the other tenants of the building move around or quietly talk to each other. The couple next door occasionally has sex, always between four and five in the morning. This starts with strange, high-pitched wimpering noises that last for a few minutes and then stop, only to start again a few minutes later, a slow crescendo towards the inevitable peak, at which the bed starts banging against the wall and it generally sounds as if some maniac was tourturing a cat by trying to squeeze it between the bed and the wall.
The house I used to live in in London was built almost entirely of wood and glass. I lived on the top floor in the triangular roof under a skylight and could see the trees in the garden swaying in the wind. On stormy nights the whole house would shake, the wind howling around the corners of my room, weather straight out of 'Wuthering Heights'. But I felt warm and comfortable curled up in my futon while outside the storm would lash the trees and the walls of my little hut.
Those were the romantic stormy nights I loved. But there were others too. The uncanny siblings of the stormy nights were the eerily quiet nights. Prolonged silence is very unusual in London, especially as we were living between Holloway Road and Liverpool Street and there was always a police siren or an ambulance in evidence somewhere. But some nights were different. The silence would slowly trickle into your brain and accumulated there at the threshold of sleep, becoming more ominous as it became longer. Eventually I would open my eyes, not tired and exhausted, but instantly fully awake, ears palpating the surroundings for noise, the senses sharpend and vivified. But none came. And sometimes a single leave would slide down the slating and create a disturbing, unearthly sound, as if somebody would scratch a single nail over the roof. The silence would thicken and become almost liquid. In such nights it was impossible to sleep.
The nights here in residential Western Tokyo are quiet to, but in a rather hushed and considerate way. There is nothing ominous about them. When unable to sleep I can hear the other tenants of the building move around or quietly talk to each other. The couple next door occasionally has sex, always between four and five in the morning. This starts with strange, high-pitched wimpering noises that last for a few minutes and then stop, only to start again a few minutes later, a slow crescendo towards the inevitable peak, at which the bed starts banging against the wall and it generally sounds as if some maniac was tourturing a cat by trying to squeeze it between the bed and the wall.
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