The All-Nighter. No sleep. A feat that, for seven-year-old boys, surpasses mythical proportions. Midnight feasts; defying bed-time orders; going where no Me has ever gone before.

I never made the grade, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Toby’s seventh birthday sleepover. He was tall, had spiky black hair, and reminds me now of a slick hedgehog. He’d assembled his most motley crew, and we had schemed a whole plan. Sustained by scary films, sugary food and Monopoly (he’d just opened a present which contained the version with the card reader – very cool) we were going to achieve the unachievable.

We got the ball rolling with Scream.  Ten minutes in, Toby’s Dad thought it funny to sidle up up behind the sofa and jump out. Harry started crying, Toby was begging his Mum to turn it off, and I had taken refuge behind the couch. Nice one Paul, way to ruin an evening.

Soon after, so dispirited we were, sleep beckoned us forth. I don’t think we even got to midnight.

Time passed – a year, maybe two? – until I believed myself ready to run the gauntlet again. The siren song of Double-Day began calling again.

My friend’s house. For reasons to come, this partner-in-boyish endeavour ought remain nameless. Setting paper on fire with a magnifying glass, watching Red Bull soapbox races, playing endless two-player PS3 games – this friend was my bro, and this friend was so game for an all-nighter mission.

Lying upon a spare mattress under a Halfords sleeping bag, the moon illuminating his Match of the Day and MythBusters posters, we whispered.

“You still awake?” “Yeah.” “Are you?” “Yeah.” “Me too.” “Cool.” “It’s midnight.” “We’re nearly there.” “I guess.”

The conversation was, regrettably, sending us to sleep. What to do? There’s only one thing to do. Head to the bathroom, and make a potion.

Find a bucket, and fill it with everything you can find. Toothpaste, shampoo, nail varnish remover, shower gel, mouthwash. Hunched over the cauldron, mixing with wizardly intent, two little Gollums sat in the dark to avoid arousing suspicion.

I don’t think we were going to drink it, but we ended up not having to make that choice.

Slowly the door swings open; in steps a half-asleep giant, who had slipped out of bed for a late-night piss.

An enormous naked shadow creature, sporting a proud and hairy gut and, beneath it, a proud and hairy appendage.

He flicked the light on. As the room was plunged out of darkness, so he was plunged into shock and mortification. His belly, his member, and seemingly the walls too, shook as he bellowed for us to get out.

We ran with the Fear of God in us, leaped into our beds, and did not say a word to each other about it – then, or ever after. Another failed endeavour to crack the Pandora’s Box that is the All-Nighter.

It was only last year that I first pulled one off. Since, I’ve done a couple more. And they have each lived up to the extraordinary promise of childhood’s ideation.

…

Sleep is, amongst all the weirdnesses of life, well-ranked for its particular weirdness.

Every night, off we go to lie on a box, waiting for Sleep to be spread across our Being like butter on a crumpet.

We rise and we go about our activities, until a pull as strong as steel compels us to rest. Yawns that lumber and blunder up through your thorax. Eyes that ask for a duvet to be pulled across their lids.

Water is understandable – drink it, or you’ll dry out. So too is food – energy, like coal for a steam engine. But why must we sleep?

Evolutionarily it seems a bad idea. Eight hours of unprotected vulnerability, at the mercy of predators, during which we can’t gather food or reproduce.

Rest is understandable, to allow recuperation and restoration.

But why do we get switched off? Why not let us remain conscious but still – on but off. Some version of this is clearly happening with dreaming.

Perhaps it has to do with a necessity to box off and compartmentalise reality. If we experienced existence as one continuously timeless moment of experience, how could we constitute selves and subsequent narratives?

There is no Self without time. Yesterday I did this, today I’m doing that, tomorrow I hope this doesn’t happen. We spend all our time either then or there, but never here. When we are Here, our sense of Self dissolves.

So, evolutionarily, perhaps we evolved alongside the movements of our ancient friends Sun and Moon, to clearly demarcate one day from the next.

Or maybe, so active and disruptive are our minds, that our bodies need to shut them off to perform essential processes. Only when offline can our brains perform the uninterrupted work of processing memory and our bodies do all they need to do.

And yet, despite the fundamental mystery around it, I love sleep.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and foundational Stoic philosopher, loved sleep too.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do?’”

“Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? But it’s nicer here…”

“So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

Book V, Section 1, Meditations

I love how he writes. Meditations was never intended for publication, but instead was his personal collection of diaries and reflections. I love the idea of a Roman emperor scolding himself for wanting to stay in his cozy bed that is just so nice.

But I sympathise too with his condemnation of the nice. I am, to both my betterment and detriment, a great lover of nice. Nice as safe, and held, and warm and tight and soft and easeful. Nice as a heavy duvet, as a cheese and bean toastie, as a shoulder on which to rest your weary head.

But you can’t have too much nice. You never go full nice.

This sunset is nice, but it would be nicer with a cold drink. This cold drink is nice, but it would be nicer with a cigarette. This cigarette is nice, but it would be nicer if it didn’t ravage my throat and deplete my energy and give me cancer. This snus is nice…

Well actually, it’s not nice at all. It burns your lip and dribbles nastily down your throat. But it’s chockfull of nicotine, and nicotine is nice, so maybe it is nice after all. I tell you though, it would be nicer with a coffee.

Routine is nice, and so is security. Few greater privileges did I grow up with than always knowing where I would lay my head once nightfall descended.

But too much nice gets tiresome, and the craving for excitement ultimately comes calling.

…

I have found there to be a kind of spiritual adventure in missing a night of sleep. Like fasting from food or participating in prolonged silence, one is led by the hand to a mind-state of otherness.

Light, floaty, surreal, ethereal. Quasi-psychedelic. Balanced and beautiful, disorientating and delighting.

The first time I went without sleep, it led to the most halcyon of days.

Pure magic. Connection; silliness; indulgence; openness.

 A night out in Newcastle at World HQ with three uniquely precious souls. One bowed out soon after midnight, hours before us Three (soon-to-be) Musketeers remaining hopped on the train back to Durham.

The morning yawned as the city slumbered. Rolling hills and swooping dales, luscious oaks in greens and yellows. So medieval, so peaceful; it feels at that hour, in that light, like a city of Eden.

Named by author Bill Bryson as his favourite building in the world, Durham Cathedral stands resplendent over its city. Crowning a rocky peninsula, formed by an oxbow in the River Wear, the cathedral appears to rise straight from the trees.

Dancing had worn our legs thin, and a heavy bassline had hollowed out our heads. But we were happy, sober, and content.

To bed? To the Land of Nod? Or instead, back to my college, for a pot of green tea, a few frames of pool, and to see where the day would take us.

Both reason and indecisiveness percolated, but soon we moved on together as one. Up the hill, laughing and floating and delighting in bountiful beauty.

The fields were pillowy sea sponges, drenched in morning dew; the breaking sun casting oranges and humming vermillion. Fields of green and rhododendrons of pink, punctuated by the fuzzy buzz of golden bees.

Beauty everywhere, as ever. But with a different valence. More immediate. Less world and me, and more world as all.

The day that followed was normal. Normal events, normal pleasures, normal pastimes.

A glass teapot of steamy loose-leaf; breath work in the college yoga studio; hot chocolate in the cathedral’s undercroft café; hand-rolled cigarettes and more tea beneath age-old oaks; gooey, drippy cheesey pizza; laughter and laughter and laughter.

But all imbued with a certain magic.

Un-limited by notions of plans and commitments; and liberated from what the normal structuring of a day demands.

I’ve experienced two such days since – one alone, after a 24-hour editing session in the run-up to a Masters-thesis midday-deadline for my master’s thesis, and the other in gloried company.

And each has been blessed with this same mystical energy.

…

The All-Nighter is a fantastical creature offering a portal to somewhere unknown. More than just the childhood conquest of staying awake, it is a doorway into presence.

In our sleepless state, the usual boundaries between self and world grow thin, and we slip through the cracks of ordinary time into something luminous and immediate. And perhaps the seven-year-old boy scheming with buckets of bathroom potions was reaching toward this very mystery.

While devastating at the time, those early failures in the endeavour toward Double-Day were not defeats but gentle postponements. Life’s way of saving this particular magic for when I was ready to receive it fully.

Sometimes the best adventures are the ones we’re not quite prepared for—until suddenly, beautifully, we are.