My Sleep
I wanted to write about my sleep, about what might be going on there, because I haven't had a dream for a long time, not for years, and I guess that might be interpreted as the death or the dying of my unconscious mind. Perhaps, you might argue, I've evolved into this super-conscient being, whose mental workings have no mystery. But the decisions I daily make or fail to make suggest you would be wrong.
I also wanted to tell you about my bed, and then I started to think about how it would be to see a photograph of myself sleeping and how creepy that would be. To see myself lying asleep would be to see myself vulnerable to attack, my body unwilled, corpse-like, down there. Part of what makes that thought disturbing is, I confess, that it has a whispering allure, as at times I do indeed wish I could rise from my body and see myself my own form, dead, spent through.
That isn't a constant desire, but can rise when life is wretched. I suppose such trains of thought should be controlled as they might lead to rather unconstructive attitudes to life's travails.
One thing about sleep is that although it's a physical necessity, you can't force it: it has to come voluntarily. It's as if there are are two of you. There is one that declares it's bed time. This one has to make it as easy for the other part of you, a younger, occasionally rebellious part, to concede to sleep. Sometimes the younger part gives up easily. But if they aren't cooperative you can't force them.
You lie, probably a sprung or foam mattress covered by a sheet of cotton, with one or two further items of raised padding, called pillows, to support your head. Then, there is a blanket or duvet. And there you are passive within cloth with, ideally, only your head or one arm protruding from that envelopment.
You're in there, your head pressing into the pillow, then you close your eyes and try to ease your mind, letting any conflictuous moments from the day fade, and you push away any hopes or aspirations so you are humble, desire free, and your passage into sleep can proceed without rupture.
If you start thinking about girls in black stockings and negligees or some other sex thing then it is better if it is a memory of a successful encounter than an ambition. The memory can reassure that the world is benign, but the ambition will excite and render sleep impossible as you lie, hopeless, speculating about how you might contrive an apparently chance meeting outside a supermarket and where that encounter might lead.
But if that process, that embarkation, is overlong and you're hanging around for ages it is sensible to give up, to return to the state of will and rise from the bed. You can iron shirts or arrange your postage stamp collection, perform some quiet, monotonous but ultimately purposeful task.
Myself, I have arranged all my bookshelves according to colour of the spines. There is something especially pleasing about the row of black books.
The sleep I want is dense, rapid asphyxiation. I want to be taken into a landscape by Poussin. I want serpentine paths weaving through forests of giant beeches and a lazy fisherman sleeping by a brook. I want distant mountains and grand stillness broken only by the wisps of smoke from a dying campfire. I want dark red brown shadows and chrome green and flashes of scarlet toga and cerulean blue sky and cartoon clouds and the occasional satyr, playing a woody melody.
I want lostness, dreamland, a place without or decision or shame.
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Read to the Albuquerque Creatives, 5 April, 2021 and Metro Detroit Writing Workshop, 7 April, 2021
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