The character, a stoic female lead brooding over the disappearance and possible death of two comrades, described it as:
"Have you ever heard of the hour of the wolf? ... It's the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. You can't sleep, and all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should've gone but didn't. All you can hear is the sound of your own heart."
– Susan Ivanova,
According to an entirely un-cited entry on Wikipedia:
The hour of the wolf is the hour between night and dawn during which the wolf is said to lurk outside people's doors. In Swedish and Finnish folk religion it is the hour when most people die and are born.
I didn’t quite understand it. My teenage self had never had nights like that. Certainly, I had sleepless nights due to a nightmare or anxiety. Insomnia? Sure. But never feeling the weight of life as she seemed to describe.
I adopted the term though; I used it in fiction and in common parlance with people.
Since my teens, I’ve had a few nights like this. Now and then, around 2:00am my brain wakes me up. Sometimes it’s a growing anxiety that lulls me from sleep, sometimes it’s my body needing to use the bathroom but then sleep doesn’t return.
Last night I had one of these. I was awake around 1:30 or 2, running thoughts and images over and over through my head. My body refused to yield to sleep. I paced. I drank. I did whatever I thought might bring sleep, but my brain insisted on obsessing.
Eventually sleep came again. Maybe it was 3 or 4. Sleep came.
The morning after these nights I’m not so much tired as numb. No emotions, not really melancholy, just sober. I move through my day with limited emotional responses despite being perfectly aware of my surroundings and what I’m doing. I’m not in a daze or anything, I’m just not myself.
Everything takes three times the energy to do during these days. I’ve gotten stuff done, maybe more so than when I’m bubbling and joking—but I’m exhausted and drained.
I hope the wolf doesn’t visit me tonight.
I know this feeling very very well. Hit me last night actually. There is a deep loneliness to it as well, where you feel like you're the only one awake at that moment and the entire night is glaring right at you.
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