Sleep

I remember being in my small bed, beneath the slant of the roof, light through the vent to my brother's room. I sang to myself, long involved stories, as I lay there expected to be asleep. I would get bored or thirsty, or scared of the dark- or rather what I imagined in the shadows. My childhood nightmares as I fell asleep were of skulls and eyes, fish nibbling off my toes. Not the self contained dreams of deep sleep, but nasty clear images of prodromal sleep. I had stuffed animals, Raggedy Anne, Pooh Bear, others, that would be at my back, keeping anything from rasping at my spine. It felt then that it took a long, long time to drift off. But I was not to get out of bed once put there, and I was terrified of what would grab my ankles if I got up. If I needed something, I would yell for mom over and over, trying to be heard. It never occurred to me then that I was being ignored. The sounds of the oceangoing boats on the Detroit River, fire trucks, the steady roar of the freeway a block away, eventually lulled me to sleep.

When I first lived in Northern Michigan, the silence was deafening, and I could not sleep. Watched a lot of bad TV. Because when I just lay there waiting for sleep, I thought anxious, repetitive, dark thoughts. Took about a month to accustom myself to the quiet. Came to love the soft dark stillness.

Sleeping in the Army was much easier, due to exhaustion. Problem was being alllowed to sleep. I would have to get up for a fireguard shift, or woken by companies of soldiers yelling cadences outside the window, or the night CQ doing bed-check with flashlight, "Smells like my grandmother in here!"- (because of Ben Gay.) Or the lights from aircraft shining in the window, we were the other side of the flightpath. Or my own coughing during the last two weeks when I had bronchitis.

Morning came barging in at 0430 or 0500, unless I was on KP, then it was 0330. We all caught naps through the day, not real sleep, the kind that you wake from at a sound, at the presence of boot steps. The head snap modified into a pushing up of glasses that hid closed eyes. Five hours interrupted sleep a night is survivable, it is not happy. Deprivation of dreams and rest would continue in Ft Sam, where the fire alarms went off almost every night, sometimes several times a night. If I was sleeping during the day on a Saturday, and the alarm went off, I would hide in my locker until everyone was gone, then get back in my bunk. I would risk the unlikelihood of a fire for the sake of sleep.


When I returned to civilian life, I would grow new nightmares. For years after I would start awake in a kind of terror. I would mull and get into anxious, self destructive thoughts. Every night of nursing school I had thoughts of shooting myself in the head, not because I wanted to die, just that I wanted to stop and not get up and try again. I had grown tired in my bones, tired of not having enough money, too much to do, too many losses to grieve, too many fears that my new love would slip from me. Nightmares of still living in my parents' house, with the ex, with failure and debt. Grace was waking to D beside me, that I was ok, that he was there. That HE was the one there.

My insomnia has gradually decreased, apogee until age erodes my sleep quality I expect. We have been listening to books on tape, now on mp3s on the ipod. Le Carre books, and Shelby Foote mostly. Still, some nights drag on until sleep catches hold. My dreams are wispy experiences, there but inchoate, not graspable. Only the weight of the cat on me when I need to turn wakes me these nights, I touch D and drift back to black.