Two to four hours before you go to bed you reach a state that sleep specialists call the “Forbidden Zone”. Going to bed during this two to four hour window is like trying to go to sleep for the night just after you’ve woken up — although I hear some people are able to manage this, too. The things people can do are miraculous to me. But going to bed during that window, generally speaking, produces the kind of frustration that keeps you up all night. The sleep specialist I visited told me I needed to make schedule changes gradually, keeping this “forbidden zone” in mind. I tried to keep it in mind during the day — today I thought about it at a public plaza, surrounded by other people. There were statues of different animals cast in bronze, or brass, or whatever metal they used on that bull they have on Wall Street, the kind that’s shiny and gold in some places and black around the corners and crevices. I lounged on a stone slab as people came and went during their lunch break and kept it in mind, near a bronze giraffe, and he looked at me until a child threw its arms around his neck and I had to leave the plaza. I thought about it at dinner while the man I was eating with, bereft, so far, of another title, droned on and on. The restaurant was decorated very beautifully, trimmed with leather and velvet and all sorts of materials for which I didn’t know the names. I stirred my veal around in its sauce until it was cold and thought about visiting the Forbidden Zone tonight — and somehow, I knew whatever my sleep specialist meant by “keeping it in mind,” he did not mean this.