My Wandering Mind in The Middle of the Night

When the rest of the world is fast asleep…

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve always been like this, even when I was a child. I used to lie there, willing myself to fall back asleep, but it just made me more and more stressed the longer I was awake. So nowadays I don’t fight it. I pick up my phone and look for something to read. Hopefully I’ll drop off again at some point.

I avoid social media in the early hours. I prefer to read articles — human-written ones. My favourite topics are languages, stories about living abroad and life in general, politics, and science. I’m interested in people’s opinions about AI too. My favourite kind of writing, though, is humour. I love a bit of sarcastic observation, especially British voices.

I’m not against AI. I think it’s pretty cool actually. But I do hate that it makes me second-guess myself. Like that dash up there, I wondered if I ought to take it out. I don’t use AI when I write, and I don’t want people to mistakenly think I do.

I hate feeling like I need to prove my authenticity. I also hate getting halfway through an article and then realising that it’s off somehow, that I’m not hearing the author’s unaltered voice, but rather a polished version of it, just a little too perfect.

It’s made me ask myself who I am as a writer. What distinguishes me from everyone else? I think I’ve pretty much decided, though, that it isn’t for me to say.

Three months ago I moved to Hokkaido. It’s the northernmost island in Japan and infamous here for its very cold, snowy winters. Hard to imagine right now when it’s 30 degrees and super humid outside. This is definitely a land of extremes!

Anyway, I woke last night from a dream. I was trying to get home (which was interestingly up a hill) on an electric bicycle, but every time I tried to go up, my bike kept sliding back down the hill, and I’d end up at the bottom.

Dreams can have several meanings, but one thing that is certainly coming out is my fear of winter driving.

A few years ago, I slipped on ice while going up a mountain road in Tottori prefecture, down in western Japan. The slip is perhaps forever frozen in slow motion in my mind. It was such a horrible feeling knowing there was nothing I could do. We slid left towards the roadside and spun right around, coming to a stop with a bump against the mountainside, which was concreted over as is common in Japan due to the high risk of landslides.

We were lucky, in my view, that we were travelling up at the time, not down. Gravity helped slow us down, and we ended up destroying the front bumper but luckily not causing too much damage beyond that. However, that experience has made me nervous. Snow and ice are dangerous.

The dream rattled me, and I knew getting back to sleep would take a while. So I resigned myself to another reading session.

Except what to read? The news is terribly depressing. Never-ending wars, growing far-right extremism, the existential threat of climate change. Not exactly topics conducive to more sleep.

The world is in a strange place right now. I’m not sure we humans are capable of taking responsibility for our planet. It makes me want to watch Star Trek reruns — except they took them all off Netflix, which was pretty devastating. I don’t buy into this idea of signing up for subscription after subscription. I have enough expenses. I’m on the verge of checking out and getting rid of all of them.

Talking about expenses, I was telling my kids this morning about how when I was young I used to get 20~30p from my parents every so often and me and my sister would walk down to the local shop and get some pic ‘n’ mix. They were fascinated by the idea of being able to buy sweets for so little.

Back to Star Trek though, I just love the idea of humanity coming together and essentially everyone working for good. Being able to pursue your interests and natural talents and work for the love of it seems like a dream come true. I wonder if all our technological development will lead to that. It’s hard not to be cynical, though, when you see the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots in this world.

I’m coming up to a transition stage of my life. My children are 17 and almost 16. So far, my life feels like it’s been split between “before kids” and “with kids”. Now I’m going to need to navigate the “after kids” stage. It’s unnerving heading into your later years wondering what the meaning of the rest of your life is.

I always intended to write. I really hoped I would be able to make a living (or at least supplement it) from writing novels. Now that’s all being turned upside down by the fact that an LLM can churn a book out in seconds. Sure, the technology is still imperfect, but how long will it be before it isn’t?

Contemplating the meaning of life at 3 am definitely doesn’t help with sleep. I’d avoid it if I were you.

Maybe I’d be better off downloading another mindless phone game and not thinking at all.