I took a 5-day trip from Los Angeles to Portugal. It was just enough time to completely disrupt my sleep pattern, but not enough to adjust to the enormous time difference. When I was back on Pacific Time, there was no sleep to be had. A couple of hours here, a couple there, but knowing that a week later I was going to spend six days in New Orleans – back another two hours – I basically didn’t sleep for the whole week in between the two trips. I arrived in the Big Easy mid afternoon, worked until about 7, had a quick dinner and went to the hotel. I was going to sleep now, and nothing was going to keep me from it. Sure enough, by 10pm I was in bed and within minutes I was gone.

Suddenly, I was ripped out of a deep sleep by a banging on my door. I sat up, my heart pounding. It took me a few seconds to even realize where I was, when I heard the door next to my hotel room open and a guy yelling: “Hey, wrong door – we’re over here!” The clock said 1.15 am.

After my adrenaline dissipated I settled back into bed, hoping to quickly drop into a deep sleep. But the party next door had just started and it got gradually louder. Now, having reached a certain age, I told myself a while back to make sure that I don’t become that ornery old guy we all knew in our youth. So I tried to shrug the noise off, attributing some sensitivity to it to my lack of sleep. As it got louder, though, it became clear hat this was truly unacceptably loud for that time of night. By now, I could follow every word of their conversation, because it was held at the top of their lungs.

So I decided to call the front desk and ask them to put a stop to it. The clerk said they would send somebody up, and sure enough, about ten minutes later, I heard a knock on my neighbor’s door and a quiet voice asking them to pipe down. They did, and I finally was going to relax and go back to sleep. I slowly drifted off a while after the noise stopped, and fell asleep – for five minutes. Then the phone rang, and the desk clerk asked: “You called, Sir? Is there something we can do for you?” I was more than mildly annoyed by now, and I took time to explain what had just happened. He apologized and asked if the problem with the neighbors had been taken care of. I said yes and hung up. Minutes later, the party next door started up again. I gave up and spent the rest of the night watching TV.

The following night was Friday night. I had put in a tough day’s work, and again I was in bed by 10, hoping that today I’d get my rest. And again within minutes I was deeply asleep. But in my dream I wound up in a strange place, where my head was pounding, and finally I woke up and noticed that the pounding was not in my head, but what I thought to be a car with a massive woofer stopped on the street outside my window. The noise was so powerful, that the ironing board in the closet rattled to the rhythm. I turned on the light and with every beat I saw concentric rings forming in the water glass on my night stand, reminiscent of Jurassic Park. I went to the window to see. The window panes were vibrating, but there was no car. There was, however, a bar across the street that apparently had just started their nightly entertainment.

I called the desk and asked for another room, and so in the middle of the night, I packed and moved. And then I slept.