Sunday Scribblings: Sleep

Hypnos, God of Sleep

I love to sleep, but at the same time I am fearful of it. Not sleep itself, but the possibility of not sleeping. Sometimes I feel like sleep is going to be snatched away from me, never to be reclaimed, never to be experienced again. Sleep is precious to me, and like most people I don’t cope well without it. I dissolve into tears and taste anxiety. Did you know anxiety has a taste? It is a sort of hot flavour with edges of lime and citrus and it screams inside my body quietly. It feels like I am shaking from the inside, shuddering and rolling and trying to jump out of my skin.

Sleep is the opposite – it is a gift. A break from myself. I get so sick of myself and my thoughts sometimes and sleep gives me respite away from who I am. Not that I don’t like myself – I do. It’s just too much of a good thing! My mind whirs, chugs, spits, screams, recoils, examines, analyses and cuts from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep. I think a LOT. I would rather think less.

I have read The Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg just recently, and I agree with her – sleep is the underbelly of life and it isn’t really treated with respect. Without sleep you can go crazy. Our mind needs that rest, needs to process, needs that break from us perhaps. Without sleep our judgement becomes impaired, we can’t process information and we become sluggish and slow.

I love to dream. I am usually fairly good at remembering my dreams. They are usually fairly exotic – they rarely include things I’ve actually seen or done. I live a whole other life in my dreams and sometimes I like that life better than the waking one, and who is to say which is more important?

Back to my fear of having sleep snatched away from me – I don’t even like to think about this fear, let alone write about it because I am afraid of making it come true. I remember reading Stephen King’s Insomnia when I was in highschool. The main character finds it hard to sleep beyond 4:30am so he tries to stay up later and go to bed at 1:00am instead of 10:00pm. He still wakes up t 4:30am leading him to state that he should have been grateful for the sleep he was receiving, and not tried to push it for more. I believe Stephen King himself is a chronic insomniac and has been for years.

My dogs sleep a lot. I suppose dogs have limited entertainment. They can’t go and put a DVD on, or take themselves to a friend’s house for dinner. Their whole life is me, playing and sleeping. I know they dream. Their paws twitch like they are running and they make little muted woofs.

I often want to incorporate sleep or the lack there of into my story ideas. A man who sleeps all day and lives his life in the grey moon-washed shadows and far off star illumination of the night (and is NOT a vampire). A woman whose dreaming life is her extraordinary “real” life and who for all intents and purposes leads a very ordinary waking life.

Ideas, ideas everywhere and not a drop to drink!