Early morning, it occurs to me, can be approached from two directions. Although one can’t literally travel back in time, there seems to be a difference between morning as approached “from behind”, i.e., as the end of a sleepless night, and “from in front”, i.e., as the end of a night of sleep. As a chronic insomniac, I’m more familiar with one than the other. I have walked the empty streets of 5:00 am, and they are the same streets whether I’ve risen early or simply didn’t ever fall asleep, but psychologically, it’s not the same.
When you haven’t slept, it feels like you have a big secret that nobody else knows, walking those streets, waiting for morning to arrive. When you’ve just woken up, the world has a big secret, and you walk around wondering just what happened while you slept.
Mostly, though, I don’t walk the streets when I can’t sleep. I sit here typing on a computer. I could use all the romantic notions of insomnia you can come up with.
When I do walk the streets while the city sleeps, I listen to Untrue. If you’ve listened to the entire album from start to end, the way Raver builds up is very much like the feeling of seeing the end of a long, sleepless night as the first morning light hits the streets.
Sep 21, 2011