Sleep

I love sleep. I love that strange drifty feeling when falling asleep happens slowly, and the gravity increases, paralysis sets in warmly. Voices in conversation around fade to nothing, then become loud and crystal clear, but the meaning is indecipherable. Ideas prod at the edges, brilliant images and frightening CGI effects. Then that too fades into deeper, darker dreams and absence.

When I was very small, I slept under a slanted roof in a former bathroom on a small bed. The window was tiny, and high in the wall. I preferred the venetian blinds down and tight to keep the shadows away. The register was a black painted grate that puffed out waves of coal scented heat that seared my face, and light poked through the grill from my brothers' room if they were there studying. I listened to their muted chatter. Bad nights I overheard hateful arguments from downstairs through the conduit. That angry high pitched male voice, swearing and hectoring, the crying of my mother. Often interspersed with the neutral noises of repairs, hammers and thumps.

The fire in the furnace would die down, and the cold would lurk back and sit heavy on my shoulders. I would squidge down to the foot of the bed, bunching the covers around me, as well as Raggedy Anne and my brothers' abandoned bear, and any other stuffed toy I could find. I wanted them at my back as the terrors of the dark closed around me. Skulls and black fish all hid in the low corners. I sang sagas to myself, awake often long, long into the night, until everyone was in bed, and longer. Later I would wake cold and back at the top of the bed, a long puzzle. My mother once complained I had scratched her when she pulled me up, and my frustration was at her interfering with my method for staying warm. She ignored my explanation, it "wasn't right". I figured she deserved the scratch, certain that in my sleep I had fought her, trying to stay cozy. Then felt instantly guilty, as well as still angry.

Summers were oppressive for the heat and sweat, the roar of fans, the itch of mosquito bites and the grit of that pink lotion that helped not at all. I would lay awake and imagine black shadows biting my back and toes.

Much better were the nights at aunts and uncles homes, with lots of cousins. I would be laid in a bed not quite strange, and drift off to raucous laughter and the conversations of Euchre games, or Rummy, or 500.

I graduated nursing school over a decade ago, book-ended with several months of night and evening shifts. I was never any good at night. I'd never pulled an all-nighter. No one in their right mind wants to see me awake at two am. I cannot sleep during the day. When I did work at night, I would get a few hours sleep when I got home, and that was it. I was hallucinating. I lost my sense of humor. I was not safe to drive, nor take care of a patient. This was not going well. So I started to listen to NPR to keep my mind still, allowing me to sleep. Which worked a bit, but had to be turned off or I would wake and start listening to it.

When I got into the OR, I went to day shift, and had to learn how to go to sleep at 9PM. D got several books on tape from the library. Shelby Foote and John LeCarre. Soothing voices, and as I heard them repeatedly, I lost interest in the story, and let the sounds wash over me, but they kept my own scurrying mind quiet. D found it helped him sleep better as well.

And that wonderful sensation of gently falling asleep, to my brain processing talk, returned reassuringly.