Thanks to good friend Doug Hackney of letting me know about this:  Jason Freedman’s post “Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99.” Here it is.

My response is twofold:

1. Hypnosis worked better than anything else ever has.
2. My hypnotist told me that my problem is that I don’t really want to go to sleep. “You’re right,” I said. “It seems like a waste of time.” I related this to my brother recently and he agreed and in precisely the same words:  “It seems like a waste of time.” Which makes me think that the Wochner family condition certainly runs in the family, and therefore may be genetic (as has always been my assumption), or may be cultural. Maybe we’re just not a bunch of time wasters.

There are other reasons I don’t really want to go to sleep. I’m a playwright, not a novelist. Novelists work in seclusion — they write their novel (inevitably in the mornings), and then they do whatever else it is they do the rest of the day. (Almost all of them:  work a day job or teach.) Playwrights write at night because the theatre takes place at night — that’s our natural timeframe. In fact, we often write after the theatre. So here’s the schedule:

• 8 PM the show starts
• 10-11 PM the show ends
• 11 PM – 1 a.m. drinks ensue, whether it’s your show or not
• 1 a.m. to ??? you’re writing your play

This applies not just to me. It’s the same story I’ve been hearing in my workshop for 17 years now, and one I heard again just last Saturday:  “I didn’t write these pages until 2 a.m. this morning….” We know, honey. That’s when all of us were writing our pages. You’re one of us.

That said, I did download the free program that the gentleman above recommended. It’s called f.lux (and no, I don’t think the wordplay is cute enough). It controls the relative light of your computer (in my case, a 17″ MacBook Pro). It lowered the glow from my screen to a shade of what I’ll call Santa Monica Pier at dusk. We’ll see if I sleep any better. And maybe this vodka-and-cranberry I’m having will help.

At some point in the immediate years hence — i.e., within the next three years — I intend to arrive upon the truly perfect solution for me:  Going to bed at 5 a.m. and awakening at 11 a.m. I did that for years and it worked flawlessly. I don’t need a lot of sleep — I just need it to be in the right timezone for me. In three years, my 8-year-old will be 11 and he can get his own damn self off to school just like his older sister and brother did. I’m counting the hours.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.