When I was younger, I thought that “sleeping through the night” was the norm, and if you couldn’t do it for some reason, there was a problem – you wouldn’t get enough rest or whatever. Reading about past generations cured me of that. Apparently human beings are biologically wired to wake up and be active partway through the night. This used to happen a lot – you just have to be familiar with Shakespeare’s plays to see how often people were awake at times when modern people would think it is time to sleep. Generally, people went to bed at sunset and didn’t “stay up late” because there was no electricity and light at night was hard to come by. Thinking about it, I realize that animals in general don’t sleep all the time when it’s dark, neither do they stay awake all the time when it’s light. Animals that I know of (most of my experience comes from cats) have a lot of leeway with this – they may be active during the night some time, and sleep a lot in the daytime. I never have “slept through the night” since my children were born. I don’t feel much privation about this, especially now that I can go to bed and get up any time I like. “Going back to bed” after a time of wakefulness is very pleasant.
But that isn’t what I want to talk about this time. I want to explore random noises that I hear, especially at night, but also in the daytime because our area is quiet – very few traffic noises etc. to take into account.
It’s important to our peace of mind to be able to identify noises, particularly at night, when they occur; otherwise we may feel undue fear of “things that go bump in the night” – which usually means ghosts. Our house is old, there are plenty of ghosts, but they mostly manifest (to me) in the daytime. I’ve never been afraid here at night, except of things inside my own head, from scary TV shows and such. (I had a fear of going into my pitch-black bedroom after watching episodes of “Twin Peaks”.) Occasionally there will be unidentifiable noises at night, and then I usually go and investigate or call my husband to do so. Nothing scary has ever happened, however.
So what kind of noises do I hear and what do they mean? (It is the end of summer now and windows are open, so I hear things more easily.) Since I have high-register hearing loss, it is more likely that lower noises – thuds and thumps – will penetrate my consciousness.
Here a few thuds and thumps that I hear on a regular basis.
Thunder. This may be followed by rain but isn’t always – I can tell when it has started raining by the lovely smell of wet dust. Very loud cracking thunder may startle me and make me cry out, but the gentle muttering of far-off thunder doesn’t bother me.
Fireworks. Since I go to bed early, I am often in bed when I hear the thuds of fireworks, rather close by or farther away. It is common for summer festivals to close with fireworks, so it is a common sound. I am not personally very interested in fireworks, so they are more sounds than sights for me.
Running footsteps. In houses nearby (and in our house when our son and his family lived here) it is common to hear the thud-thud-thud of rhythmical running footsteps. I hear it from the next-door house in the early morning when the couple who live there are about to go to work, and used to hear it in another house where there was a little girl – she is too old to run now, but when she was about 4-7 years old, I heard it frequently.
Cats jumping or running. For such quiet animals, cats can be quite noisy when other sounds are stilled, such as at night. The sound of a cat jumping off the bed and onto the floor is very familiar to me, as is running around playing (I have two) when they get the “zoomies” in the middle of the night or early morning. They can sound like hippos!
Just to balance the account, I will mention here a couple of familiar daytime noises.
Pounding. In the daytime I often hear mallets or hammers pounding, either nails or stakes in the garden, a rhythmical noise which is not easily mistaken for something else. Faster and lighter is the sound of a woodpecker at work on a tree, sometimes heard in the daytime.
(slightly higher register) Pigeons cooing and insects trilling. The lovely sleepy sound of wood pigeons calling, the end of which can never be predicted, or the harsher sounds of insects trilling, are common sounds in the daytime in summer. I can always tell when dawn is here by the chorus of cicadas that begins in a favorite tree right outside my window. (I go to bed around 9 and get up generally before sunrise in summer.) There is also a very loud insect called hingurashi (the “darkeners” or “sunset bringers”) which call at sunset and dawn, and this sometimes wakes me up. Right now the insect noises in the daytime are tapering off, to be replaced by the night sound of crickets. It always reminds me of a poem I wrote back in my student days in Kyoto, part of which went:
…while the moon soared through the cold sky
And the tired-sounding crickets
Raised their untiring song.
The crickets at night do indeed sound tired, but this is probably just how they sound to us – they probably don’t feel tired themselves, we are responding to the sleepy sound of crickets when we ourselves are lying sleepy in bed.
So these are some of the sounds which accompany my nights and days at this time, in this place, as the year winds down toward autumn.
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