Falling awake From the royal toilet to dirty socks: Insomnia takes a turn for the worse BY CHRIS WRIGHT

WHEN I WAS a boy, I used to lie awake at night thinking about the queen of England. Specifically, I used to lie awake and think, "The queen poos." This, to me, fell into the same category as the fact that the universe goes on forever, or that Mark Parker had been inside Victoria Rodriquez’s underpants. These were concepts so implausible, so unimaginable, my mind would struggle with them until I could hardly close my eyes, let alone sleep. Her Royal Highness, a crown on her head and an imperious expression on her face, her bejeweled fingers peeling sheets of toilet paper from the roll ... wipe-wipe. Impossible!

As I grew older, the things that kept me awake at night changed. By my preteen years, I was lying in bed grappling with more sophisticated conundrums, like "The queen has sex." Then there was the matter of whether lions were wicked for killing little baby wildebeests. Or the Russians, who certainly were wicked, and who had a million bristling nuclear missiles pointed at my bedroom window. But this was only a vague anxiety. Rarely did I lie awake at night and fret about immediate, personal emergencies. I can’t recall, for instance, worrying that my goal-scoring skills weren’t improving quickly enough, or that I hadn’t done a shred of homework for the past three weeks.

But with the passing of childhood comes a new kind of self-awareness, one that supercedes life’s larger questions. The queen’s toilet habits, how many pennies it would take to make a stack as high as the Empire State Building, all that was pushed aside for more solipsistic, and troubling, concerns. There was the issue, for instance, of my cock. Was it big enough? Would it work properly? Then Princess Di came along, and with her the renewed intermingling of sex and royalty. At least some of my questions were being answered. And with the answers came sleep. I was lucky then.

THERE IS a reason spirits come out at night, and that they often tend to visit us in our bedrooms. Sleepless nights put us on edge. They multiply and magnify our fears. They make us see monsters in shadows and spilled blood in crumpled shirts. As we grow older, our nocturnal bugaboos become more earthbound, but just as fearful. Pilot lights loom menacingly in the dark, waiting for the right moment to explode. Every creak and rustle heralds the arrival of a sadistic killer. At least this is the way it’s become with me. The nights when I would lay awake and ponder the royal bowels are long gone. The mysteries of the universe have given way to imminent, gut-knotting alarm.

Even the smallest worries will come crashing into my dreams. I’ll sit bolt upright at 2 a.m. and think, "Socks!" — as in, I don’t have any clean ones. Then I’ll remember that I failed to mail my rent check. Then, as I lie there contemplating my impending homelessness, I’ll worry about the little pimple on my neck, wondering what effect the chemotherapy will have on my social life. Not that I have much of a social life these days. Which isn’t surprising, given my sock situation. If I get run over tomorrow, someone’s going to comment on those socks, maybe make a joke about them — Peee-yooo! — as I lie there on the slab. Jesus! What if I get lucky?

At this point, a ghostly personal critic will appear to point out that my chances of getting lucky are far slimmer than my chances of getting run over. Having settled this point, he will go about the business of picking through all the stupid things I’ve said and done over the last few days. Let’s take a look at that e-mail you sent to the cute PR woman, shall we? And it doesn’t stop there. When the critic’s done, my guilt goblin will stop by to tell me how long it’s been since I last called my mother. After him, I’ll have a meeting with a spectral representative from Tello’s, who’s come to give me a quick primer on shirt-pricing.

The ghosts of past, present, and future.

ONCE IT sets in, insomnia is a kind of purgatory, a time out of time. As the hours grind on, I’ll become a sluggish contortionist, raking my limbs across cheese-grater sheets, forming a series of tortured hieroglyphs. I’ll get up and smoke a butt, lie back down, explore the topography of my ceiling, pick up a book and try to follow the words as they wriggle across the page, watch a rerun of The O’Reilly Factor, sip a tepid cup of water. None of this helps. So I’ll think of that night on the train, with that stranger, the lifting of her skirt, her "What are you doing?" — although she knew all right, oh yes. But no. In the end, I’ll resort to force of will — screw up my eyes and make myself go to sleep.

Right.

By the time you’re losing sleep over not getting enough sleep, you’re done for. The only thing left now is to wait. At this point, the fact that the universe goes on forever, that there is no beginning and no end of time, seems more plausible. Slab. Why do they call it that? Such a horrible word. Something you put meat on. But what happens to the part of you that’s not physical? What if death is like this? An endless cycle of old news and joyless sexual fantasy. To sleep? Perchance to wank! Ay, there’s the rub. What did he mean by "mortal coil" anyway?

So this is how it goes, my mind, having run through the million petty anxieties that fill my days, returns once more to the larger themes that seemed so engaging all those years ago; it now settles itself upon the clock, which provides a soundless countdown to the moment I can reasonably get out of bed. The queen poos. What a disgusting thought. I close my eyes and listen for the alarm, which usually goes off about 15 minutes after I’ve fallen asleep.

Chris Wright can be reached at any hour at cwright[a]phx.com