Sleep: A Love Letter (by Peg)

I must have the lowest threshold of boredom in the Western world. Here I am with an unprecedented, frighteningly unpredictable future of unclaimed time in which I could follow my every whim and passion, provided it doesn’t cost anything and I stay unemployed. I should be renovating my house single-handedly; I should be taking my dogs one by one to their checkups and then training them to bring my slippers and pipe; I should be writing (the Great American Novel); I should be cooking (the Great American Dinner Party), I should be walking (the great Southern American botany field trip). Instead, I lie happily captive to sleep’s morphine dream, rising gently toward wakefulness, then willing myself back down into the feather-soft gray, for hours and hours after the customary eight have passed.

Yes, I know, I should make myself do something. I am surprisingly single-minded in the care and feeding of that which inspires me, but no such inspiration presently beckons. Yes, the garden needs tending--but I don’t care. The house needs cleaning, the kitchen needs renovating, the bathroom is disgusting, the laundry is mounting, and my shoes are piled in a heap, the heap being in my closet only to avert nasty and embarrassing stumbles--but I don’t care.

I must sound spoiled, but I’m not, haven’t been. It’s not that I feel a sense of entitlement; it’s just that I feel the paws of a heavily snoring sloth around my neck and the ache of my body bent forward to carry her inert weight. “Sloth,” I say, as we approach, reluctantly, the borderline of wakefulness, “Sloth, isn’t there something we should be doing?”

“Plenty of things,” says Sloth. “But almost nothing we want to do.” And with that, she gives her adorable little sloth snort and cuddles up against me, lulling me once again into the gentle rolling ocean of unconsciousness.

“To sleep, perchance to dream!” Shut up, Hamlet. You don’t know sleep like I do, like Ophelia does. You imagine your manly tumult will survive the River Lethe, that your passions are strong enough not only to inform your deeds here on earth but to continue as a source of reproach in the hereafter. Hamlet, Hamlet, our sins are twin, we do not act but react; when we read it is all “words, words, words,” we expect some powerful external event (the appearance of your father’s ghost, my transcendence into some joyous creative state) to change us; we refuse to acknowledge that unless and until we choose otherwise we are but narcissistic human pinballs, not the creators but the victims of our destinies.

At least Ophelia and I understand the true dynamics of your supposed quandary. One does not choose sleep as a means to avoid some painful situation or condition of being. One chooses sleep as an end in itself. Sometimes I think my happiest moments are those when, my natural buoyancy surging me toward the skin of consciousness, I gasp a panicked newborn’s breath and then realize, as my middle-aged sensibilities set in, that I need not awake—not then--for some arbitrary but officially sanctioned reason (day off, weekend, vacation, serial unemployment). In the anarchic hedonism of that moment, that moment when, with grateful relief, I pull my pillows around me and rabbit-chase my legs across the foot of the bed just for the sheer sensual delight of the feel of the sheets against my bare legs, as I thrash to my left side, pulling the comforter over me in a tidal surge of warmth and smell of loving sleeping dog, I feel a sense of synchronicity with my immediate environment that I know nowhere else. So little is demanded of one when one sleeps, yet sleep is perfectly acceptable--unlike drinking to excess or opium-taking or even artificial means of prolonging wakefulness.

It is said and written that great achievers have little need for sleep. I understand the passion that sneers at pausing. I have felt it, and have willed alertness into the danger zone in service to it. When free of such compulsion and released from schedules imposed, I would not trade and will not apologize for succumbing to my drug of choice. Dreamt or dreamless, slumber seduces and soothes like nothing else. When I sleep, my demons are beside but not inside me. They crawl out, make nests, circling like dogs do, and leave me alone until I brush my teeth. They snore and snuggle.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…don’t wake her. She’s happy in there. Goodnight, Moon.