September 2018. During the first nine weeks of my time in Vancouver I have problems sleeping. I don’t fall asleep until two or three in the morning and even then I only drift into a very superficial slumber. When I get up in the morning I have the feeling that I was awake the whole night and sometimes I even have a very clear memory of watching myself sleep. During those nights it is as if my consciousness were hovering a few inches above my resting body, watching it sleep, but itself wide-awake pondering on and on. Pondering about things that had happened in the last weeks and months in Berlin. Nothing specific and nothing dramatic, just everyday situations: social interactions, moments in dance class, performances I had seen, things people had said, things I had said. It is as if my brain had decided to revisit all these moments, and now that there was little else to do, it played them all back to me a second time.
I develop a kind of sleep neurosis. I start planning every action of my day as to allow me to sleep. At night, when I nevertheless can’t sleep, I lie in bed analyzing what might be the cause of my insomnia. Did I go swimming too late in the day and now my body is flushed with adrenaline? Was it the coffee at 14:00 h? Did I move too little? Did I go to bed too late? Or too early?
And all the time I have my own words in the back of my mind. Those three words that I put into Ruth Sorel’s mouth for her speech to the students: Sleep a lot.