Tōth: The Witching Hour – when the veil to the Other Side is thinnest and why I stay up so late

I can’t pinpoint when my obsession with the night started but I’ve battled on and off with my nocturnal leanings for a better part of the last five to 10 years. When I was still drinking and partying daily, the night felt filled with infinite possibility and mystery and I had an unquenchable thirst to get everything I could from it till the sun came up or until I couldn’t walk anymore. When I got sober almost six years ago it still felt that way! It was as if the night promised a deep relief in the form of some cosmic truth that would arrive to me if I only stayed up late enough. Yet, I often went to bed disappointed and without answers.

Reasons why staying up late is bad:

1) Staying up till 4am, 5am, 6am, or 7am every night makes it exceedingly difficult to function in society. Being a zombie and feeling like shit is no bueno for biz.

2) Morning is an incredibly gorgeous, peaceful time of day. To wake with the birds! To wake with the world!

3) According to the experts our natural circadian rhythms line up generally with the sun going down and coming up. Don’t fight nature or your body: consistent sleep = happiness and well-being.

4) It’s bad for romantic relationships i.e. if a partner is waking up at 8am to go to work, me staying up to 4am or 5am isn’t the best vibe.

In the past five to six years—since I’ve gotten sober—I’ve tried many things to adapt a more “normal” sleep schedule. No ice cream after midnight (I eat a lot of ice cream). I downloaded an app for my laptop and phone screens which get rids of the melatonin suppressing “unnatural” blue light waves after the sun goes down. No work or screens one to two hours before bed; instead drink tea and read. Set my alarm clock earlier to force a new sleep schedule. A smoking cessation hypnotist even gave me these funny blue-light deflecting sunglasses to wear indoors in the hours approaching your desired bed time!

I’d go to bed by 2am and I'm up by 9am or even 10am. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment, savouring the extra morning time. I'm excited for my new, more well-adjusted life. But this never lasted more than a week before I’m back to my old ways.

Most of these nights get filled with songwriting and demo recording – countless times over the years working on music until the sun comes up. I tell myself it’s for my craft or it's towards some possible record, but really I just have a physical/spiritual need to make stuff. It’s therapeutic, it's fun, it's addictive, it's magical. I’m currently at over 150 “homeless songs” from the past two to three years and hundreds more song seeds in voice memos. Maybe some of it's useful but a lot of it is just weird and funny ditties. A significant measure of this output would be possible while keeping early morning and daytime studio hours like an adult professional real human person. So why subject myself to the extra pain? Sure, between 11pm-6am the world is generally quieter. The twittering calms down and there’s less email, texts and phone calls. Fewer distractions.

At some point I was venting my sleep pattern frustrations to a witchy friend of mine. They said perhaps it’s because the “veil to the other side is thinnest” in these late night hours. According to Wikipedia “In folklore, the witching hour or devil's hour is a time of night associated with supernatural events. Creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts are thought to appear and to be at their most powerful. Black magic is thought to be most effective at this time.” And furthermore: “Psychological literature suggests that apparitional experiences and sensed presences are most common between the hours of 2 and 4am, corresponding with a 3am peak in the amount of melatonin in the body.”

Am I drawn to the wee hours for greater contact with supernatural inspiration, ghost and demon whisperers?! I do often feel possessed, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ghost. Or does this pattern merely coax a natural altered state reminiscent of my time using drugs, lowering my creative inhibitions? I really don’t know. I’ve made stuff I really like in broad daylight. The moon and I are deep friends, but I’m still striving to wake with the birds. There’s plenty of ghosts hiding in the sunlight.