--John Dunne
Sleep, last night, was a thing not to be had by any means, and the salve of which the poet speaks remained obstinately out of the question.
Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep
Murdered, yes--not, in my particular case, by MacBeth (as far as I know), yet murdered still. Alone in my bed (except for two dogs and my wife), I suffered for long hours the death of sleep, the untended wound of wakefulness. The last time I looked at the clock, the hands showed 3:30. But that means nothing, other than to mark the last time I judged there to be any sense in looking.
What was it that had so completely chased sleep from my life? Was it the fact that MS had un-jointed all my bones the night before and I was still aching from it--feet, ankles, legs, knees, shoulders, neck? But that should have made me tired, one would think. It must be concluded, therefore, that being tired does not necessarily lead to sleeping.
Was my mind too crowded with thought? Never. It has never before happened.
Perhaps I was care worn, or perhaps my mind was full of plans for the coming day.
Nope, this is not likely at all. Without the application of strenuous effort, enough anyway to raise a sweat, my mind remains pretty much a blank slate--so purely so, in fact, that it exasperates other people. Take my wife for instance. Please.
An old Rodney Dangerfield joke is enough for my brain to grapple with, let alone the cares of the world and all the best laid plans of mice and men.
Seriously though, take my wife--a woman with whom I have rarely spoken because there are too many mental concerns and designs and conversations blocking the channels of peripheral noise (i.e. my voice). Honestly, I have sat with her on the front porch many a time and said many a word without making, for all intents and purposes, a solitary sound. I have watched and seen and felt the envelopment of her entire person in its own private counsel.
The only other time this happens is when she watches a movie. She does not just watch, but her spirit itself enters the TV set and lives among the characters there. One might as well ask Mel Gibson or Brad Pitt, or whomever the actor might be, whether he could interrupt her for a moment in order that she might at least briefly attend to something in the outside world.
Well, don't you ever think? she says.
No, it tends to keep me awake.
Nonetheless, if one finds himself still awake for too long after his head hits the pillow, one does begin to think in spite of his best efforts not to. In my case this has nothing to do with plans for tomorrow, chores to be done, things to be remembered, grand plans and designs--No, quite the contrary, I find myself ruminating in circles over a movie, for instance, that I did not understand (still without arriving at any answers, mind you). Who exactly was Little Dorritt related to? What was her part in this big mystery that took seven episodes to sort itself out? My God I've watched channel 10 for seven weeks now, hanging upon the elusive answer to this mystery, and now the show is over and I still don't know what happened!
From Little Dorritt, my mind wanders to a post I will write about sleeping. This becomes very long and involved and profound. It becomes so comprehensive in fact that it plays at the very edge of revelation where the meaning of the universe and human existence are concerned. But I remember not a bit of it the next day. It was merely a rumor, spread by exhaustion.
I remember then that someone at church said I have a Doppelganger running around the city. A double. This in itself was not surprising, for I had already heard of him many times in the past. But who is he? That is the question that angles for my attention. What does he want? What is he doing right now--at 2, at 3, at 4 in the morning? Sleeping? And if one double sleeps, does he sleep for both? Is it somehow impossible for both to be absent from consciousness at one and the same time? What would happen? Would it be anything like The Day the Earth Stood Still.
OH GAD! Now I had done it. Instantly my mind fixes upon this silly movie, on Keanu Reeves, on the conviction that I could have played the part of the main character just as well in my sleep. If only I could sleep. Was Keanu asleep during the filming of this movie? It's a serious question.
I would guess in hindsight that it was somewhere after 4 a.m. when I finally slept.
I woke up at 6:30, half of my body underneath the Labrador, the other half under my wife and stepson. I think I dreamed that I was a puppy. Breast feeding. In debtors' prison. On the day the earth stood still.
"To sleep, perchance to dream-
ay, there's the rub."
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