I didn’t sleep well last night. I woke up laughing.
Strange, I thought. Never had that before.
For the first time in my life that I can recall, my dream was apparently sufficiently entertaining that I started to giggle and woke me up. A friend was solemnly telling me that Vladimir Putin was trying to poison him by injecting neat alcohol into the stem of his pen, since you ask – it must have been the mismatch between him and his assumed geopolitical centrality that did it.
Every time I tried to go back to sleep, I remembered the dream and its absurdity and I started again. You cannot, it turns out, doze off when you’re sniggering. Not, to be fair, the worst way to spend the small hours, but neither was it the most productive – that glymphatic system won’t work on its own.
Struck by the novelty, when I got up, I did what any self-respecting modern hypochondriac would do – I asked an AI (I actually asked four – the first one might have got it wrong. We take hypochondria seriously around here.). Nothing to worry about they all said. It’s actually a good thing, they reassured me – your metacognitive functions are sufficiently strong that they never go entirely offline. One said I have “heavily myelinated neural pathways” which I felt was a bit personal.
I had experienced “hypnogely”, said another. Enough of my Greek remains that this seemed plausible. If you needed a name for what had happened, “sleep laughter” would be a reasonable choice.
Names have a reassuring quality to them. If we’ve bothered to invent one for what you’re experiencing, you’re not the first person to experience it. You might be odd, but you’re not that odd. And, if it is a problem, there’s more chance of fixing it if we’ve already had a go. No need for medical free-styling.
But as early morning turned into mid-morning, I realised that not only had my vocabulary increased slightly, but I had had my own “Black Swan” moment. Not in the common sense of an unusual event, but in the formal Nassim Taleb sense of something previously unsuspected. A bad dream is a rare occurrence, but one I know can happen, waking up in hysterics – who knew that was a thing? My possibility set for “things that can happen when you close your eyes” had to be expanded slightly.
But if my understanding of sleep needed to be widened slightly, so, I realised, did my understanding of myself. “Thing which can wake up giggling at its own dreams” was not a description I would have applied to myself before today. It’s probably not the sort of thing I would lead with in an interview or on a date, but it is, it turns out, true. I just didn’t know it.
Had I always had this ability and it had taken a few decades to show itself? Had I recently acquired it and deployed it at the earliest possible opportunity? I lean towards the latter – years of meditation must have had some effect – but I don’t really know. Either way, it is likely that it was there before I knew it. A day, a month, several years. Either way, I am not the person today I “knew” I was yesterday. Not radically different, but certainly not the same.
Our self-knowledge is always retrospective. We know what we have done, and from that we can draw conclusions about who we are. But none of us has done everything. You have some native ability to do Brazilian jujitsu. If you never do it, you will never know exactly what that is – shockingly limited in my case, I suspect. In the course of learning something, you may have greater capability than you have yet deployed. A child may be able to ride a bike, but doesn’t know they are a cyclist until the training wheels come off. Our self-image is like a five year old’s brass rubbing – you get the general idea, but there are gaps.
And bits where it goes a bit wonky. For none of us really sees ourselves as we are. There are additions here and there. We claim qualities we might not generally display, treating isolated instances as if they were proof of permanence. There is a degree of inflation – half-skills puffed up to mastery. I can technically stay on a horse while it jumps over a fence. But the fence in question was about a foot high. And I did it once.
Deep down, we know this, but we don’t let ourselves know it. Instead, we airbrush away any needle that might puncture our bubbles. We get upset when people treat us as we are, not as we think we are, hackles rising at any perceived slight. We overcompensate when a crack threatens to appear in our facade.
And for what? To preserve a reproduction, not an original, to grasp ever tighter on the water flowing through our hands?
Last night was one Black Swan. There will, I’m certain, be others.
You’ve gotta catch ‘em all so I’ll go to bed early tonight. Sleep, as we are constantly told, is no laughing matter.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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