If Only I Could Sleep Like a Binturong
Haven’t paid my sleep debt in two years now.
There’s an animal in the title of this little rant. And I’m so jealous of it. Well, I’m only jealous of the impression it left on me when I first saw it with my eyes.
You’re wondering how I got here? Talking senselessly about animals on a weekend that I am supposed to be relaxing?
To tell you the truth, dear reader, I know exactly how I got here. And it all started when I stopped sleeping.
Sleep used to be easy.
It was second nature.
Like flipping over on a springy bed, resting your heavy head on a plump pillow with cotton covers that run cold to welcome you into dreams, and collecting your awkward limbs into a foetal position under covers before drifting away.
Or so I thought . . .
But that’s dishonest. Dramatic, even. Sleep hasn’t been kind to me, particularly during the Winter-to-Spring transitions when hay fever imprisons my nostrils in a gunfight of sneeze-or-die. The only way out? Pop those antihistamines. You know, the hydrazine and its accursed family consisting of cetirizine and levocetirizine, paired with a fair dosage of corticosteroids. This is promptly followed by sleeping like a 40-million-year-old monolith, interrupted only by a couple of nights spent awake in withdrawal.
Not a pretty sight.
It’s just a short span, though, when you compare it to the rest of the year, when sleep comes naturally. Mostly. It always did come, though. Always. Until my better half came into my life. That’s when I discovered the real power of the endocrine system and how it can brew up a cocktail of hormonal shifts so turbulent I’d be falling with a gleeful smile without having slept the whole night.
But that, too, was just a phase. As they say. Who are they? I don’t know. But people do pry into the personal happenstances as if it’s the job of their grimy noses. Not that I complain, I have become one such person.
I digress. The point was, my soulmate, now wife, had high hopes that I’d iron out her skewed routine, particularly where it’s frayed out around the witching hour. However, as love usually has it, it was I whose sleeping pattern had to rewire itself.
Even then, sleep, so sweet, did come.
Until she was born . . . the permanent period to my genie-wishlisted, jealously-guarded, almost-like-a-superpower ability to fall into the lap of sound sleep.
I know, I know. I’m making it sound gnarly. My daughter is the loveliest and happiest person that could ever happen to me. I swear it on my stack of pillows. But she also is a disruptor on a grand scale—a small, chaotic puddle of smiles and the sweetest of voices with the tendency to rock our orbits no different than a supermassive black hole.
It’s funny how, as I slowly inch towards the uncivilised hours of night, even as I type, my sleep evades me. It no longer wants to be my BFF. The sleep I adored has a new target, who usually tucks in comfortably between my wife and me, and makes sure she has her room by flinging sleepy kicks and punches.
The state, as of now, when my daughter is closer to being a year and a half old, is desperate. I can only daydream of sound sleep. Haven’t tasted dreams (of humane quality) this side of the Milky Way since 2024.
Improve your sleep hygiene, you say? What am I supposed to do when a little Tasmanian Devil twists behind my back and fishes me out from the cool embrace of sleep?
Keep off the phone, you suggest? No can do, good reader. I have the twin curse of a work shift that softly kisses goodbye the graveyard shift an hour early and dumps me all hungry at midnight.
Don’t you go through REM, you ask me? No, I don’t anymore. It’s not available to purchase due to the shortage created by the Organic Intelligence, our sleeping beauty. (Wink!)
It was with the tightly compressed gist of these thoughts that I woke up on Saturday with a feeling of having rested yet not feeling restful enough. The morning light had been forbidden to disturb the slipping peace, thanks to the heavy curtains draped on the two windows in the room. The air conditioner had just woken up for another cycle of maintaining the ambient temperature. The fan was beating down cool air on our comforter-comforted bodies.
There were sounds outside: a dull clang of kitchen utensils two blocks away; the happy trill of a songbird yet unidentified, only pierced by the sweet cacophony of an Asian Koel; and the sounds of my parents awake in the room next door, doing things that parents usually do in mornings of mornings (by waking up at ungodly hours). Otherwise, the universe was sleepily gestating. The clock might have been crawling towards 10 a.m., but I am being totally honest with you here. The universe indeed was sleepily gestating.
As if on cue, because why should her father have the right to sleep, my daughter pivoted in her sleep, mumbled something of discomfort, and slammed her feet on my ribs. The sensors on my skin launched into action. The synapses on the receiving end of this electrical onslaught were so robbed of rest that they jerked the brain up with pitchforks to help them learn to ignore the irregular-but-frequent attack from a toddler aged less than two. A signal in retaliation travelled downstream from the brain stem to suppress the body and make it turn the other side, the old slug. But sadly, this to-and-fro firing in the neighbourhood of my consciousness also alerted the eyes. They were ready to betray sleep.
But the brain, or rather I, was a stubborn old nut. I kept these photon junkies hostage to my psychological games of pretend-sleep. Nope. What morning? I don’t sense light in the room. Do you sense light in the room? Of course, you don’t. I drew the curtains before I slept. So why don’t the two of you roll back and ask the brain to slow down? Yeah, bring some memory up, and we can pretend-dream, too. Much obliged.
The universe might be gestating, but it certainly is a clever bastard. A single energy particle from the cosmic background radiation saw my plight, took pity on the sunlight being made to wait outside, and shot through to flip my neurological circuitry. The dream I had artificially chosen for my eyes to wander into was of the cloud-like bed in the resort we had stayed in Ubud, on the island of Bali. What I got from the cosmic horror interference was the figure of a large, furry mammal sleeping dreamily on a branch in Bali.
As sharp as the day I’d seen it, and laser-projected in full 8K, Dolby surround sound quality, I was transported in front of the binturong enclosure. It was a sunny, humid day with the hint of possible rain, exactly how the tropics like it. My wife and I were in the Bali zoo, navigating an area made for arboreal animals, the most impressive of which was asleep without a care in the world.
It was then, and I do remember this distinctly, that I had made the passing remark of mock-jealously at how lazily this binturong had found comfort on a rough branch. Oh, to have that power.
The cosmic particle, aged with wisdom since the dawn of time, had flipped the wrong switch and then proceeded to flip the bird at my mental state. Sleep? Take that, sucker. Our great-great-great-great-(times millions)-grandson sent some light your way eight minutes ago. Show him in, you lazy old bum.
My eyes, busy looking jealously at the life-like projection of Binturong, straightened up and rolled the eyelids back. Sure enough, there was some light in the room, no thanks to the fan spilling any lost rays incidental on its metallic blades to goad me into waking up.
I then sighed an enormous sigh and tried to shift my weight, abandoning all hope of falling asleep again and giving in to the Sun’s rude awakening, when I felt two tiny legs resist the shift in my belly’s posture. I couldn’t move, lest I wake my daughter up.
Sleep had evaded me once again. But who says I can’t remain lying in bed? Yes, it was ten past ten by then. So what? It’s just the global propaganda of Big Time.
Only then, once I had turned half of my body uncomfortably, did I look at the little devil sleeping next to me. Her face, although impassive, showed the hint of a little smile playing at the corners. I knew my daughter was trouble for my sleep. Knew it well in my heart and my bones. But she was also a trouble to all things time.
I felt my lips stretching abnormally into a proud smile, the kind that dads have when their kids one-up the universe. You want me up? And disturb this cute little piglet beside me? Fat chance. Try again when Andromeda’s close.
I then shut my eyes, called the brain in for another session of pretend-sleep, and asked it to play the 8K binturong projection. So what if I can’t sleep like a binturong? The memory of one was calm enough to possibly lull me into a short nap.
All thanks to my daughter.
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