Sleep

William Porter identifies sleep as one of the main ways you can become addicted to alcohol. Alcohol interrupts sleep, so you sleep badly and feel terrible and the best way to get over feeling terrible is to have a drink. Homer Simpson's famous gag about alcohol being the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems is a pretty grim but accurate description of this addictive process.

For the last year or so before I decided I really needed to stop drinking, I badely slept. I was drinking lots every night, waking at 3 or 4 in the morning, walking through the day like a zombie until it was time to start drinking again. This time got earlier and earlier. I didn't connect my sleeplessness to my drinking, so I wasn't ashamed of it. It was only when I read a bit more about the process that I realised that being a really early riser - which is good in lots of circustances - can be a real indicator of an alcoholic. Before she died, my mother was becoming like this: the aperitif started earlier each day, and was pursued more studiously every evening. She'd always got up pretty early but this was becoming pathological. Her illness and death were horrible to deal with, and I wish she were still here, but it's a tiny comfort (like, really tiny) to think that she had yet to get to a stage where her increasing problem with booze took over her life.

According to William Porter, the mechanism is something like this: that because alcohol is a depressant, your brain - if it is sufficiently used to drink - produces a stimulant to even out the effects of the dpressant. (This is a very simplified version). Then when the booze wears off, the stimulant is still in your system and wakes you up with a jolt, and you can't go to sleep again.

The three-a.m. self-loathing is one of the worst bits about drink. And it's not simply that you get insufficient hours of sleep, it's that you don't really sleep properly at all; you pass out. You don't get to slip naturally into proper REM sleep, or to surface from real slumber in a natural way. When I give up drink the thing that has me skipping down the street with a merry tune on my lips is always the fact that I have slept properly, and had interesting, fun dreams. It's amazing how long you can go without something that seems so essential. It can't be good for you.

I'm not going to write an essay about it but there is a lot of alcohol in Macbeth, and a lot of sleeplessness, and I wonder if the corruption and decline of the central couple has a lot to do with drink, and drink-related sleeplessness. Macbeth has visions, Lady Macbeth sleep-walks: there is a bleeding between the subconscious and the conscious that has to do with lack of sleep, and it seems to me that that sleeplessness if of the fevered vicious kind that comes from drink.

(Weed is disruptive of sleep too. Tonight I will sleep without drink or smoke. I'm looking forward to it.)