The Idler

BED LIEUTENANT

Getting up is never easy. John Lennon, Elvis, Rossini - they all had incurable horizontal tendencies. So what’s the answer asks Louis Theroux

When I was at University, my friend Ken came to me one day with an exciting discovery. Ken and I had been grappling with the same problem for several weeks - namely, how to get out of bed in time for breakfast. Seeing as breakfast was served until nine o’clock, this meant getting out of bed by 8.50am. No tall order, you might think. And yet I tell you it was impossible. Each night as I went to bed I would set my alarm clock for 8.50 am and tell myself: ‘You will get up in time for breakfast.’ And each morning, come 8.50, I would hear the alarm, hit the snooze button and stay in bed. My half-awake self simply would not honour - did not consider itself liable for - resolutions made by my fully awake self.

Ken’s discovery was simple - a foolproof technique for getting himself out of bed on time. It went tlike this: keep a cold mug of coffee and two Pro-Plus caffeine pills by your bedside. Set the alarm for 8.20 am - half an hour before you actually want to get up - and when it goes off, in the instant lucidity that the alarm triggers, knock back the coffee and pills, then go back to sleep. Half an hour later you spring awake in the grip of a massive caffeine rush. Ken said he’d tested his method that morning with excellent results. Even so, I passed. I recalled reading that, towards the end of his life, Elvis Presley had resorted to a similar method, and for a teenager to adopt the habits of the mature Elvis didn’t seem a good idea.

The Ken method came back to me recently. You see, once again I’m having problems getting up in the morning. (Getting up in the afternoon still comes pretty naturally - I’ll know I’m in trouble when I can’t manage that.) Once again, my fine resolutions are piling up like unpaid bills, and I find myself wondering why, If I know that something good and right and desirable, can I still not find it in myself to do it?

I’m having problems getting up for a number of reasons. Because I don’t have a job at the moment. Because I am going to start a job in a few weks so I don’t have to go job hunting. Because I have plenty of money to live on so why shouldn’t I do what the fuck I like? Because I like lying in. The fact is, if you need to badly enough, you can get up.

I’ve got up before 5 o’clock on several occasions. I could do it because I had no choice. The problem is I just can’t seem to get up when I don’t have to. People will call me lazy, a slugabed. I prefer to think of myself as suffering from ‘wakelessness’.

Naturally, those who suffer most from wakelessness are those who least need to get up. This is why ageing rock stars are so often wakeless. Why should Elvis get up before sunset if he’s not playing Caesar’s till seven? Not only Elvis, but John Lennon was plagued by wakelessness through much of the late seventies, according to his biographer Albert Goldman. By late 1978, Goldman tells us, Lennon was bed-ridden 24 hours a day. ‘Totally prostrate, John couldn’t even raise his head to look at the television screen; instead, he employed a pair of trick glasses with prism lenses that enabled him to watch while lying flat on his back. In that strange periscopic state, John Lennon passes the winter.’

Around the same time, Beach Boy-in-chief Brian Wilson hired a $10,000-a-week therapist for the chief purpose, as far as I can tell, of getting him out of bed in the morning. And in 1980, Marvin Gaye was rescued from his bed in London by a Belgian concert promoter. The Belgian took him to Ostend to live with his family like an exchange student, while Marvin worked on overcoming his drug addiction - and getting up at a reasonable hour.

Nor is the problem limited to the pop stars of our own day. The Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini so disliked getting up that he once began writing a new opus rather than leave his bed to get a half finished one. Later he grew to lazy to compose in bed and renounced music altogether (apart from a few little airs that don’t count). Whose to say how many more William Tells the world might have been blessed with had Restoration Paris known Pro Plus pills - or even those special John Lennon glasses?

Like anything else, sleeping is a pleasure in moderation, a menace in excess. This is pretty much the view taken by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, a sort of pop star of his own time, if you take vernacular prose to be the rock’n’ roll of the 16th century. He writes: ‘If I am particular about anything in my way of life, it is rather about sleeping than anything else.’ He goes on to say that he can get up when he absolutely has to but tends to oversleep the rest of the time. ‘Even at this age I continue to sleep eight or nine hours at a stretch, ‘ he says. ‘I am weaning myself profitably from this lazy propensity, and am obviously the better for it.’ Best of luck on your ‘weaning’ then Michel.

If Montaigne was particular about his sleep, it may have been because he knew how to enjoy himself to the full. Getting the most out of sleep is a bit of a quandary since you are by definition unconscious in its throes. Montaigne’s special gift to the intelligent sleeper was his technique for getting round this. ‘Rather than let sleep insensibly escape me, ‘ he says, ‘I used once to have myself woken up, in order that I might catch a glimpse of it.’ To anyone interested in serious sleep, let Montaigne be your model and your guide. Have yourself woken up so you can doze off again. It’s fun and inexpensive. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately using my clock radio and the snooze button. As for the small matter of actually getting up in the morning - that’s one I still haven’t cracked.