Sleep

 

Hospital in May

Sleep, the subject, comes around regularly as night follows day. How pleasant to think about that over which we have no control, more pleasant anyway than death and taxes. Today the newspaper has a fresh article on the ancient habit, if we may call sleep a habit. The eight-hour day honours eight-hours sleep, those hours spent not working and not being recreational. Sacrosanct is the time our body spends each day asleep. It is a sign of good health. After the news of the heart-attack I began reflecting on sleep patterns in the past year, going to bed early, power naps surpassing 45 minutes into REM extravaganzas, snoozy snatches on the couch. The heart wasn’t dealing with disease, my body craved more than eight hours every day. Exercise was not as attractive as shut-eye. My body craved a normative pattern. The newspaper says sleep time patterns vary and sleep shortens as we age. We ponder whether aging grows with memory, if our world makes more sense at later stages, now there’s a way to judge what’s worth thinking about, what is not, and how good sleep is dreamt up from such awareness. We cannot break the habit of a lifetime, we would have sleep that goes unbroken. Or do we? The newspaper recommends reading or listening to ambient when we wake in the night. I don’t see how this is any different from playing with our apps or browsing our email details in dead of night: the energy levels are going to increase, distraction will keep us awake. The reason we wake in the middle of the night, it’s called biphasic, varies so personally anything might be going on. Our One Brain has a trail of trials that won’t instantly be resolved listening to the music of Brian Eno. My sleep is biphasic, divided in two by the simple need to have a widdle. Such is the regularity of this break from dream transmission, I am soon enough returned uninterrupted to my prior stream of consciousness. Hospital has turned my sleep temporarily polyphasic, hour after hour of blood tests, stomach needles, drug stops, flying doctors, numberless nurses. In hospital, anaesthetic releases us from all such thoughts, into a sleep of immeasurable peace. Morphine keeps the dull body ache at bay for hours. Adjustable beds glide or tilt or elevate me into restful reclines previously unimagined, all in the name of sleep. Though uninterrupted blissful sleep may also be induced by the simplest, inartificial of means. On election night (21^st May 2022) in the hospital, the following statement from ageless psephologist Antony Green, sometime after 9 pm, helped me drift off happily into the sleep of the just: “On the figures I’m looking at here, I cannot see the Coalition holding on to more than sixty seats.” Two Panadol also helped.

Sleep

 “There is no greater enjoyment in life than sleep when one is sleepy,” writes Anton Chekhov in a letter. Siesta in lockdown is like that. One reads a little then one is sleepy and the afternoon recedes. Cares go into quarantine, likely to emerge later remote and careless. One may go down deeper than a dream. Day restored has its lists, further liabilities and limits. Lockdown orders its own routines, which seem to include sleeping more. Then comes night again. Never was the city so quiet as during these moon-soft curfew hours. [Sleep], free from the intense outlines of day.

Sleep (August)

 The world does not hide that the world turns from light to dark and our bodies follow suit, our bodies trained for slow reflexes and a safe harbour to curl in; where there is light the eye opens and as the world turns, shut eye.

Under the influence under the synapses under the fragments of a freeform poem under the skullcap under the wavy hair under the sheet under the two doonas under the cat under the ceiling under the roof under the cold clouds under the arc of the starry sky, drifting off.

Within this timeless place metaphor begins, the analogies that daytime scarce realised, the fullness of perception that explains visions; here the ancient confrontations are comforted, uncomfortable meetings confronted, and in quiet is all untold actions, unwilled.

Sleep is premonitions of death, said the poet at the talking table of the writing workshop who is now dead, though his shades inhabit the pages of his effusive books and his memory arises benignly while awake and elusively asleep.

O experimental radical self-styled innovator of overheated overcooked disconnected rhymeless load, how you do distress yourself out of your own nightmare awake to find you alone in the Augustan Age, your glass of water, the dark silent room and its window onto the rhymed garden and moon of every sequential night.

Some people sleep through anything: thunderstorms, train wrecks, jail breaks, zoo time, wailing blues time, the horn section, security sirens, symphony orchestras, standing ovations, coughing fits, mammoth meteorites, crashing crockery, clanging cutlery, ambulances, fire engines, buzzers, blasts, battalions, even their own funeral.

They were not long for this world who are seizing the day, were fading fast who are waking widely, were nodding off who are ready for anything, were dead to the world who are alive to the moment, were unavailable for comment who are impossible to shut up.