unsleep.

With my ear pressing tight to the feathers in my pillow the blood’s muffled echo sounds like footsteps outside my window crunching methodically in the invisible snow -- the sound of feet slapping sidewalk – I know that’s from a Mt. Eerie song... & that’s what my heartbeat sounds like, as I’m trying to sleep while it runs, runs like a small mammal’s heart, little feet crashing through a forest.

When I was younger I was distrustful of sleep. I suppose many children are... whether due to the possibility of unpleasant dreaming or just the fact that in sleep you go away for awhile, & then return... I used to make myself anxious then, thinking of the East Slavic & Siberian stories about your soul venturing out while you sleep, transforming into a little moth, a little mouse, exploring crevices & canyons in a dark forest (or under the bed), all while one is asleep. That’s always seemed frightening to me – what if they got lost? Went too far didn’t make it back in time for morning? Abandoned you & didn’t come back? Or got eaten by some other prowling night soul? The vulnerability of mice & moths, tiny esoteric creatures... such things made me uneasy because of their fragility, uncertainty... (Maybe if the soul turned into a tiger or a bear, I’d have been less terrified?)

Still, when my heart runs on & on like this, I immediately think of the tiny mouse of the soul, padding quickly, quickly... & how vulnerable it really is.

Sleep is highly mysterious to me, even now. I think I certainly appreciate it much more – I often crave it & relish it with great desperation in times of stress... In the autumn I even get a little jealous of animals that get to be cozy & hibernate. Yet I still worry about certain things... I cannot go to bed if it means leaving some major project unfinished, be it a poem or term paper. I feel too electric, too alive to sleep... & I begin to worry that if I die in my sleep I won’t be able to finish it so I better stay awake & complete it so if I die, at least then it will be done! I would hate to die unfinished. If creating something is like giving birth to it, it would be like my work, my writing dying stillborn... & that’s tragic. (I’m a little illogical during the late hours, so it took me a while to realize that if I would be doomed to die that night, it would probably happen regardless of whether I was asleep in bed or scribbling furiously by the window...)

Sleep seems too close to death sometimes, I guess. A little death, a taste of what it could be like to be not here -- & when dreaming, what it might be like to live a different (though often bizarrely familiar) life. In her new book Decreation, Anne Carson writes some interesting things about sleep. I haven’t quite digested it all yet (which is always necessary for her writing) but I do like her title for the essay: “Every exit is an entrance”. I like what she implies about sleep being both a departure & an arrival at once. Good sleep can indeed be a freedom, a lessening of waking burdens. This is similar to death, & the fact that we do it each night, like a ritual, as a mirror of birth & death is also very profound. I suspect that’s why it frightens me a little at times. When I’m having a panic attack, (& I suppose I’m having a small one right now) I want to cling to being alive as much as I can. Because to my twitchy mind, death & craziness are the greatest threats right now. (‘Craziness’ being a sort of death/rebirth of its own could be something intriguing & frightening to ponder, but not right now, not good to think about now.)

& often I can’t sleep just for too much thinking, as right now. I believe that we like to think that the entire world sleeps as we do – that everything else stops between the hours we are not awake – but it doesn’t. Nothing really stops at all. Humans might sleep, but human machinations (from computer programs to wars) keep on running all night. Even human bodies keep on, of course. Keep on functioning for better or worse. We replenish ourselves in sleep, but we also keep on disintegrating; tumours keep growing & cells keep dying.

My grandmother sleeps nearly all the time now. Sleeps like a cat in her hospital bed, squinting heavy eyes dimming blue when I go to see her. It’s almost like she is getting further away from life, removing herself slowly; she is retreating into sleep as a gateway to leaving life.

I feel horrible waking her sometimes when I visit; she seems more peaceful asleep. Her breathing is less laboured, frantic, frustrated... & it occurs to me that my reaction, to wake her, to keep her awake when I’m there is a sign of my clinging to her, my natural selfishness to want her alive & here with me.

I want so much for her to be happy now. Content & painless. But yet I still want her to talk to me, tell me something... I wake her simply to make sure she’s still here. & it bothers me that I can’t know if her sleep is good, if the dreams wherein she lifts her hands, shaking, grasping the air, are pleasant. Yet, she can’t even talk & tell me when awake, so what am I doing? It’s futile. But it just unnerves me that sleep & death seem to tangle their threads here, merge in a way that becomes too immediate & clear.

& as for me right now I guess sleep’s little mouse feet mirror all too closely these things like vulnerability & helplessness & uncertainty... whether in dying or living, these things I’m feeling all too much in my waking life at this time. So for me it’s all the more difficult to relinquish that little bit of control I still do have in order to rest. What little we can do when we are awake is even less when sleeping. It’s sad to me somehow, though I know that I’m fighting against a lot of futility here. There’s nothing I can do for my grandma, nor for my father, whose cancer treatment keeps him alternately awake & angrily restless, & too exhausted to move.

I’m tired now. I won’t sleep for awhile. But I should stop this non-sense, because it’s 2:30 & though at this hour, I’m entitled to some amount of un-clarity, my words are getting drowsy faster than the rest of me, & thus I should stop.