The Nightmare of Insomnia

A lifelong insomniac traces his sleeplessness back to adolescent nights spent listening to Long John Nebel’s midnight radio program on WOR, a show devoted to UFOs, the occult, and certified maniacs that rewired his relationship with nighttime permanently. Decades later, past seventy and living in Mexico, the problem has shifted from falling asleep to staying there, with four AM arriving reliably to deliver a full tribunal of regrets, bad decisions, and betrayals rendered in high definition. The same darkness that once felt thrilling now runs a criminal investigation against itself, and the only comfort is that Long John Nebel, broadcasting lunacy into the night from a New York radio station, somehow made more sense than anything the wellness industry has managed since.

I have been at war with sleep since adolescence.

Normal teenage boys were sleeping. Growing. Developing character. Preparing for the future.

I was lying in bed at two in the morning listening to a man named Long John Nebel interview UFO cultists, hypnotists, vampires, psychic surgeons, anti-communist paranoids, ex-priests, failed mystics, and people who looked at clouds and saw messages from Saturn.

This was not considered healthy behavior in suburban America during the Eisenhower years. Then again, neither was jazz, interracial dating, or reading books without pictures.

The Long John Nebel Show came out of WOR in New York and ran from midnight until six in the morning, five nights a week. Midnight to six. The graveyard shift. Radio for insomniacs, taxi drivers, amateur schizophrenics, lonely alcoholics, and teenagers already drifting toward the outer darkness.

Nebel himself looked like a man who had witnessed at least three government cover-ups and possibly caused one. Calm voice. Dry wit. Professional skepticism wrapped around a carnival barker’s instinct for madness.

The timing of the show was perfect. Television had just mugged radio in a dark alley and stolen its lunch money. Entire stations across America were panicking. Executives wandered hallways in sweat-soaked suits asking each other if anybody still listened to radio.

So WOR handed Nebel the worst time slot imaginable and essentially said: “Fine. Put the lunatics on after midnight and let them discuss flying saucers until the transmitter explodes.”

Instead, the thing became a phenomenon.

Every night Nebel assembled an all-star team of certified maniacs. UFO abductees sat beside theologians. Mad scientists debated spiritual healers. One guest claimed Atlantis had relocated to New Jersey. Another insisted the government was hiding giant skeletons somewhere beneath Arizona.

Nobody laughed them out of the studio.

That was the genius of the show.

Nebel understood something America has since forgotten. People are starving for mystery. Starving for weirdness. Starving for any conversation not engineered by corporate lawyers and pharmaceutical sponsors.

Sometimes Nebel moderated the insanity. Other nights he simply stepped out around three in the morning and let the guests argue among themselves while the nation slept uneasily beneath electric blankets and Cold War dread.

By fifteen, I was ruined.

I had become nocturnal. Falling asleep in algebra class. Drifting through high school in a fog, a junior-league beat poet with hormonal problems and a radio addiction. Teachers thought I lacked discipline. In truth I had simply discovered the American subconscious too early.

The damage compounded slowly, the way bad habits do. Through my twenties I kept musician’s hours without being a musician, which is a particularly pointless form of self-sabotage. In my thirties the insomnia calcified into something structural, a nightly negotiation between exhaustion and a brain that refused to stand down. By my forties I had accumulated enough sleep debt to bankrupt a small country.

Over the years I tried every sleep remedy known to desperate civilization. Meditation. Breathing exercises. Herbal teas brewed by smiling frauds in health food stores. Prescription pills with side effects that sounded curses read aloud from a medical textbook nobody wanted to finish.

Some worked briefly. Most did not.

Now I am over seventy, which means insomnia changes shape. In youth the problem is falling asleep. In old age the problem is staying there. The body turns traitor around four in the morning and throws you back into consciousness, a bouncer ejecting a drunk from a casino.

Four AM.

A cursed hour.

The hour when every mistake you ever made returns wearing brass knuckles.

During the day I am functional enough. Rational. Civilized. I can still convince myself my life made a certain amount of sense.

At four in the morning all of that collapses.

The brain becomes a prosecutor with unlimited evidence and no interest in the defense.

Suddenly I am replaying every catastrophe with the obsessive patience of a man who has watched the same accident footage a thousand times hoping the outcome will change. Every wrong turn. Every idiot decision. Every person I trusted despite overwhelming evidence they were operating on entirely different principles than the ones they advertised.

Why did I go left instead of right? Why did I stay in situations long after the walls started burning? Why did I doubt myself when my instincts were screaming? Why did I spend years trying to win approval from people whose souls resembled damp cardboard?

The mind loves these questions at four in the morning because there are no distractions. No sunlight. No traffic. No social performance.

Just you and the tribunal.

And the worst part is the bizarre certainty insomnia produces. At four AM every bad memory feels mathematically conclusive. Every humiliation becomes eternal. You start mentally auditing your entire existence, a drunken accountant trapped in purgatory.

Friends who betrayed you reappear in high definition. Conversations from thirty years ago suddenly return with improved dialogue. Tiny embarrassments swell into Greek tragedies.

Meanwhile the body lies there exhausted while the brain conducts a criminal investigation against itself.

This is the dirty secret about aging nobody explains honestly. The body weakens, yes. But memory grows claws.

You become haunted less by death than by reruns.

Some nights I walk around the house in darkness, an aging private investigator searching for evidence that my life contained hidden coherence. Maybe I missed something. Maybe there was a pattern. Maybe all the disasters connected elegantly somehow.

Usually the answer is no.

Usually the answer is: “You were a human being making decisions while confused.”

Which should be comforting.

Instead it feels like discovering the pilot of your airplane learned navigation from astrology charts and bourbon.

So there I sit at four-thirty in the morning listening to distant dogs bark across Mexico while my nervous system reenacts the entire twentieth century.

And somewhere in the back of my mind I still hear Long John Nebel introducing another midnight guest claiming telepathic contact with Venus.

Honestly, he made more sense than most modern wellness experts.