I hate to sleep. Yes, I am one of those who think that we will only evolve even when we learn to give up hours of sleep to restore our biological functions. Which makes me, of course, an eternally regretful tourist.
Not by my choices of fate—ever! But for the time I spend sleeping in them. If you, like me, are one of those who don’t like to waste a second on travel, you understand me.
I’m the type that fights with the time zone and gives up counting rest periods. If we are in a new place, it is to enjoy everything! Sleep is for the chair on the plane, as much as it suggests a dilemma.
I don’t even like to think about it and I only decided to write about sleep here today because I’m going through a period where I’m forced to deny everything I wrote above. I come from a week that mixed the heavy workload with a party schedule of (several) birthday celebrations.
With that, I woke up now destroyed. And angry. Rage at having a body that ruthlessly asks for rest when life calls for action. A situation, I insist, that I have experienced countless times when traveling.
What a pleasure it is to wake up at dawn in a place you’ve always dreamed of being and unexpectedly enjoy the beauty of the night? My anxiety about the act of sleeping, in several situations, was only calmed with the reward of the enchantment of a nocturnal landscape that, had I been a person of more conventional biological rhythms, I would not have experienced.
Like the night I woke up in the silence of Sultanahmet, Istanbul, even before the first prayers echoed in the mosque towers, and found warm snow slowly coloring the vaults of ancient buildings that separated me from the Bosphorus.
Or the night view from the porthole window of the boat that took me to the Spanish island, in the Galápagos archipelago, hours before strolling on those soft sands between pairs of sea lions.
From the roof of my hotel in Timbuktu, I had an encounter with the Sahara desert, in the middle of a sleepless dawn, which defies words. As well as the view of the modern tower in the capital of Japan, from the top of the thirty-seventh floor of my room at the Park Hotel Tokyo, at 3 am.
Walking alone on the soccer field while it was still dark while all of Trancoso is still sleeping was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, as was waiting for the year 2022, at midnight, in the icy waves of the Ile de Ré, France.
Only in the deep night could I kiss whoever I wanted without being disturbed in the middle of Astor Place, when I lived in New York in 1989, or bathe without clothes with a group of good friends in Carneiros, Pernambuco.
Waking up in the wee hours facing the Santorino crater and just listening, without being able to see clearly, that tireless sea is something I keep in my memory forever. As well as the sky that greeted me when I woke up in the middle of the night cold in the yurt where I was trying to sleep in the middle of nowhere in Mongolia.
The Northern Lights in Alta, Norway. Trees singing in the night breeze at Constance Tsarabanjina in Madagascar. The last punks to sleep in Candem Town, back in the 1980s. The last song I heard in Sal, Cape Verde, before I went to bed.
Shows that, if I had let myself be carried away by the temptation of sleep, I would never have lived. In fact, like so many others that I would still like to share with you, but that now, of necessity, I have to leave it for another time, because the day will still take a long time to arrive and I unfortunately still have to attend to the whims of a body that insists in sleep.
