3:15 a.m, and the Glowing Rectangle of Despair
Masturbating to the Shipping Forecast, and listening to weird obsessives from Croydon
There’s no technology, really, that helps with this. Here I am again, it’s 3 a.m., and I’m sat in the dark. The only thing I can think to do is sit and dictate into my iPhone Notes app, like a man with far too many thoughts and nowhere to put them, except, apparently, a glowing rectangle of despair.
It’s a common theme in my life that, when I’m awakened in the night while asleep, yes, that tautology is deliberate and accurate, there’s often very little I can do to get back to sleep, and I’m not entirely sure why.
Most older men complain about having to go to the loo several times a night, usually because of one medication or another, or some inconveniently expanding organ. I don’t particularly suffer from that. No prostate dramas here, thank you very much.
But the minute I do wake up, yes, I must go to the loo, and that, I think, is just standard issue human plumbing.
The Tyranny of Screens at Stupid O’Clock
But that’s not really what I want to talk about. It’s the fact that here I am, again, at 3 a.m., and I don’t want to be sitting staring at a screen, writing or working on my computer artwork, or confronting the harsh fluorescent dictatorship of the DAW, trying to make music.
I’d like to spend the time creating, but I don’t want to spend that time sitting at a screen, writing. And it’s not productive for me to be doing anything else, because everything I do for work, by some cruel twist of fate, is screen-based. Screens are now my colleagues, my office, my workplace, and possibly my next of kin.
I’ve worked for over 30 years at the cutting edge of technology, education, teaching, games, interactive entertainment, and currently as a technology architect looking across the tangled spaghetti of complex systems in businesses.
I’ve used technology creatively. I’ve used the very latest gadgets, platforms, bleeding-edge nonsense. But there is no technology to fix this particular problem.
Staring at Lightbulbs and Dreaming of Cavemen
If I sit and stare at a screen at night, it’s like sitting and staring at a lightbulb, only with emails, notifications, and crushing existential dread built in.
People don’t often think of it like that, but a lit screen is, effectively, a lightbulb. An LED screen, of any form, is illuminated and firing photons straight into your tired, baffled eyes.
In the cold, deep dark of night, that light can feel like a sort of comfort. If we were still hunter-gatherers out on the plains, freezing our bottoms off in the ferns, and we saw a light, we’d make for it. The invention of fire must have felt like a bloody miracle. A safe haven of light that didn’t immediately try to kill you, revolutionary. One of the greatest inventions we ever managed, somewhere between the wheel and the kettle.
Historical Sleep Was Weird, But Sensible
Back in ye olden days, before electric light, or even gaslight (which now just means someone denying you’re upset while rearranging your reality), people went to bed when the sun set.
And they would naturally wake up several hours later, at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., not to check their messages or doomscroll, but to actually do things.
Samuel Pepys wrote about this, and we know from thousands of records that this was a normal, accepted thing. Our natural sleep cycles are biphasic. We sleep, wake, sleep again. It’s not natural for us to conk out at 10 p.m. and snooze uninterrupted until dawn like Victorian babies in adverts for laudanum.
Productivity via Chronic Insomnia
So really, I ought to be getting up now and doing something, writing, making art, working on digital bits or sonic fragments. And I do, sometimes.
People often ask how I manage to be so prolific, and the honest answer is: insomnia. My productivity is basically just chronic sleep disturbance with a LinkedIn account.
I sometimes do three, maybe four hours of work during the night. Or at the very least, I think about work. Or I pretend to think about work while Googling obscure synthesiser manuals from 1983. Either way, the time passes.
Screen Time Means No Sleep Time
However, because I work with screens, once I engage with them, I’m done for. I cannot go back to sleep until I am dog-tired. Not just ‘I could nap’ tired, but ‘I might collapse and dream of tax returns’ tired.
And I do find, particularly on days when I’m not working, that if I do this, I’ll go back to sleep around 4 a.m., absolutely knackered, and then I struggle to get up at any remotely civilised hour.
It’s a very odd rhythm. Like jazz, but depressing.
Dreamland Theatre: Lucid, Vivid, and Bloody Tiring
Another reason I wake up is the dreams. Not just your run-of-the-mill flying-through-a-shopping-centre nonsense, but vivid, detailed, lucid things.
I’ve just had one now: I was trapped in a building, unable to get out. Bit like being stuck in a council planning office forever. It was like someone had adapted Cluedo into an escape room with existential stakes.
The funny thing is, I get actual lucid dreams. I know I’m in them, I know they’re happening. Which sounds terribly exciting, like some sort of shamanic mysticism, but in reality it’s just exhausting interactive theatre in my head at 2 a.m. with no interval and no bar.
When you have vivid, lucid dreams, they leave you knackered. There’s real effort involved. I often wake up feeling like I’ve been part of a fringe festival production no one reviewed.
I’m anxious, physically tired, mentally frayed. And that’s just from dreaming about IKEA lifts and forgotten appointments.
This latest one was full-on anxiety in dream format, and I knew it was a dream, and that just made it worse. Meta-anxiety. Delightful.
Health, Illness, and the Mad Cocktail of Side Effects
I’ve got most things under control in my life now. Since the illnesses a few years ago, I’ve had to relearn how my body works.
Managing chronic conditions is now part of the routine. And these dreams, these odd sleep interruptions, are probably side effects. Either from the drugs, or from the numerous cardiac events, or the virus, or the sheer psychological battering.
Take your pick. Might be all of them in one lovely medical milkshake.
All I know is that my sleep is, on the whole, better now than it was. I’m rarely dog-tired anymore. But I haven’t fully adjusted to these weird, broken nights.
Spoiler: Technology Still Isn’t the Answer
As for technology? No help whatsoever. Staring at a screen for three hours is the opposite of helpful. That’s not rest, that’s just late-night eye torture.
But unfortunately, we now live in a society where screens are our overlords. Everything we do, reading, watching, communicating, raging at strangers, is mediated by these glowing rectangles.
Even listening to streaming content feels claustrophobic. Compressed. It’s like someone’s piped Radio 4 through a toothpaste tube.
Audiobooks, YouTube videos, they’re not made for calm, passive listening. They’re made to shout listen to me now! Even the ones that claim to be relaxing sound like they’ve been EQ’d by an anxious pigeon.
Masturbation, the Shipping Forecast, and Janine from Croydon
Apart from masturbation, of course, the age-old best friend of the stressed, the frustrated, and the under-slept, the only thing that really helps is BBC Radio 4.
But of course, Radio 4 doesn’t broadcast all night. And masturbating to the shipping forecast is, let’s be honest, a very niche activity. Not impossible, but it requires commitment and a flexible attitude to eroticism.
Most speech radio now is combative. Angry. Full of shouters. It’s not even the weird kind of phone-in radio we used to have.
Back in the 1990s, when UK radio started going 24/7, the overnight shows weren’t about ratings. They were strange, gentle corners of the night, where the chronically sleep-deprived or the emotionally unusual could find a human voice.
Somewhere for Sid Rumpos and Janet from Croydon to gently ramble about their begonias.
The Death of Quiet
People returning from shifts, people with nothing to do, people who just needed to hear another voice. And it was warm. Slow. Odd.
Like having another slightly eccentric person in the room with you. The Internet hadn’t yet given them digital soapboxes, so they came here instead. And that was okay.
Today we have Charmaine from East Croydon, shouting about bins. And traffic. And immigration. And “what this country’s come to.”
The gentle is gone. It’s all combat and conflict. Even the weather is reported like it’s a personal betrayal.
There was also a sonorous yet intimate feel to late night phone ins that has been lost. The conversations had gaps, time for thought, the notion of one caller in then one out, didn’t play out. They felt weirdly intimate and yet expansive. Echoey yet being whispered in your ear. The acoustics were very much late night,
We have lost those communal broadcast spaces where someone can hold court but leave gaps. Where you can hear a thought actually emerge or where we start to see the surrealism and absurdism of the mundanities of life. Everything is now about attention, volume and reaction. The conversation is now compressed. Like an amateur blues guitar solo, the compression evens things out at a level that is way too high.
This, too, is how tech has been misused. Algorithms have driven everything to the edge. We chase clicks, eyeballs, outrage and reaction. Everything is louder. Everything is bigger. Everything is amped up to eleven and screaming for attention. I don’t anymore and never really did. If you’ve read this far, hello! But I didn’t need you here. This is the interior of my mind, churning things over. I’m dictating like Doctor Johnson on speed here as if I feel that doing that can empty my head of the ceaseless noisy torrent created by the lucid dream. If I empty my head will it feel like that almost infinite deep gap when Bernie from Watford suddenly realises he’s wrong about the Ikea logo?
What Now, Then?
And that doesn’t help me at 3:15 a.m., sat here, having dictated into a phone for 15 minutes straight with no plan and no caffeine.
But it does make me realise: I don’t have to look at a screen at this time of night. I don’t have to surrender to the glow.
But like the drugs I take, I’m not entirely sure I can stop.
And creating that dependence? That’s the real crime of modern and emerging technology. Not the fact that it’s loud, fast, addictive, but that we keep coming back to it like moths to a very shiny, very distracting and very destructive flame.