If Sleep Would Only Come

I remember when sleep was easy. Well in actuality, that is something I do not remember because back then I never thought about sleep except when Hamlet worried about the sleep that might come to end the heartache and the natural thousand shocks that his flesh might be heir to: the end of a day. Or when he worried about the dreams that might come in that eternal sleep when he had shuffled off his mortal coil. But then I just fell asleep without suffering troubling anxieties. As I continue to age, I think about the nothingness that is death and not the dreams that may come in it. I do not liken death to sleep. Sleep requires awakening and I do not hold to the possibility of an afterlife and resurrection which implies an awakening. I hold with John Prine’s father who told him “Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead peckerhead.” Spinoza teaches me that the free man thinks least of all about death. Hamlet was not so free: he had the death of his father to think about and the question of his uncle’s and mother’s complicity in it. Maybe it was his own death, too, he thought about: “To be, or not to be, that is the question!” I do not now feel so free: I think too often about death, and I worry about the readiness of the sleep that can come to end the heartaches and natural shocks that are inherent in the life of the day. 

Back then I just slept. I would lay me down and not think about falling asleep at all: I would just fall asleep. I would dream. And after seven or eight hours I would mysteriously awaken rested, arise from bed and begin another day, and unless I hadn’t done my homework or studied for the test, I would do so with enthusiasm and anticipation. For years I ran four to six miles in the early, early morn even before the night shifts let out or the school buses began there runs. I suppose that there must have been times when sleep eluded me, but I cannot remember any extended period of troubled non-sleep. Then, I did not take medications that I do now to calm the anxieties that keep me awake. Then I did not awaken several times during the night to go to the bathroom to urinate.

Having assassinated King Duncan in his sleep Macbeth mourned that he had murdered sleep and subsequent to his heinous deed Macbeth did not sleep again. And yet he could not cease thinking what it was that he missed. He moaned, “Methought I heard a cry ‘Sleep no more!/Macbeth hath murdered sleep.’—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,/The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath/Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,/chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Macbeth had murdered sleep and therefore, “Cawdor shall sleep no more! Macbeth shall sleep no more!” What Macbeth had lost is exactly the availability of the chief nourisher in life’s feast, the relief and peace that comes with sleep. Macbeth is forever in life bereft of rest. This condition will drive him mad!

It is certainly not that I have murdered sleep so much as the process of aging and worry has made sleep all too conscious and anxiety burdened. These days I awaken regularly throughout the night and stir too early. Regardless of the season it is dark when I return frustratingly to consciousness and it seems futile to remain abed. Sometimes I might lay abed for another half-hour or an hour, but I am irrevocably awake and the dreams are finished and the worries of the day begin. No, there is no concern for being or not being, only considerations of what the day portends: the myriad thousand shocks that flesh is heir to. Perhaps, I have not murdered sleep but I have certainly given it serious wounds. 

Then, I was not concerned if I would sleep: I slept. In a matter of a single second I would transition from consciousness to sleep and my unconscious would take over. I dreamt. Now, I have little concern about the dreams that may come—that always do come—though I have no nightmares. I’m considering what it means not to murder sleep but to suffer angst about its occasion and span: to worry about when it will come and how long it will last. Sleep seems now an event that needs to be thought and worried about; now, each night when I decide to lay myself down I am concerned that my anxieties will keep sleep away, and to bar that possibility I take sleep aids and place replacements doses by the bedside in the event that sleep will not return after another trip to the bathroom.

Ah, this post requires a piece of closing wisdom but I am too tired to write one.