On sleep

C’est Mecredi. Ma fille a un rhume aujourd’hui, et elle reste chez nous à la maison pour toute la journeé. La pauvre fille! Aussi, elle a l’asthme, et elle tousse beaucoup. Elle a la difficulter de respirer. C’est un jour tranquille, et j’ai decidé de nettoyer toutes les salles de bain. J’ai déja fini
le salle de bain à l’étage inférieur, et je dois nettoyer les deux salle de bain en haut.

Trouvez sous, ma description d’un mon experience avec le sommeil. Maintenant she dors très bein. Mais il y a quelques années j’etais beaucoup de problèmes de sommeil.


It is 2 a.m. I am still awake. My thoughts wander, as I lie in bed, waiting for sleep, longing for that merciful moment of sleep. Sleep is a very strange phenomenon, and one that a lot of people, especially young people, take for granted. But people who fall into patterns of insomnia, as I have done lately, know how precious, how wonderful sleep is, and just how hard it is to accomplish. For sleep cannot be simply accomplished. You cannot will yourself to sleep. Willpower has nothing to do with that gradual sense of falling that we experience. Sleep just happens or it doesn’t. Sleep happens when you are utterly relaxed. Your body and mind both have to be relaxed. It is not enough to have one or the other relaxed. They both must together allow that gentle movement into sleep happen.

Falling to sleep is almost an unconscious action. As you fall into unconsciousness, you are not really aware that it is happening. You are not aware. That is the beauty of it. When you are aware, you are not asleep yet. You lie in your bed, aware of your body’s level of relaxation, aware, aware, aware, not blissfully unaware. You think, my head is heavy, very heavy, my limbs are heavy, but my mind, and here is the problem, my mind is alert, active, monitoring the state of my body. Your eyes are not open, and yet you are entirely awake. How can your body be relaxed and your mind still be going on and on in circles

. At these moments, you play mind games with yourself. For instance, you might try, “I will lie in this position at all costs. This is my final position. I will not move again until I fall asleep.” And this seems to work for a few minutes. You manage to keep your body relatively still for a time, but then a certain restlessness hits you, and you turn. So much for that one.

Another game I have tried is the game of imagining myself falling. The movement into unconsciousness is often seen as a moment downwards, a falling. So perhaps these images are enough to bring on sleep. I imagine a roller coaster, whee, whee, whee, over and over, down and down, never up, always down. Then my mind turns to a childrens’ slide. Yes, I’m at the top now, and I come down again and again. Then I’m joined up to an IMAX film, or a Disney ride where I believe that I’m in a boat or starship and I’m moving very fast and downwards. Children scream. Down I come.
Not being able to sleep drives you a bit insane. You get more and more tired, each day, hoping against hope that sleep will come blissfully this time. Hour after hour pass by, and, nothing, nothing at all happens. What time is it anyway? 2.30. Read a non-exciting book. I’ve heard that helps. I read a book that I actually like, and it turns out to be more exciting than I had anticipated. I read, kept in suspense, and my mind stays as alert as ever. I think to myself. Boy, my eyes should be closing now, really they should be drooping down, like an older person whose head falls down and down.

In the book I am reading there is an older woman who never sleeps. Older people often don’t sleep well. Something happens with age that make sleep more difficult. Parenting doesn’t help, and if you are a woman, and a worry-wart, and a parent, your chances of sleeping well are not particularly good. Stress causes sleep disorders too. Some people have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. Their heart races and they become very frightened. They panic, and sweat.

But back to sleep and now, a celebration of falling to sleep. I can only describe sleep’s arrival as the arrival of grace, a grace that cannot be controlled, but is given, suddenly bestowed. And you can’t thank anyone for the gift, for you are gone.

And where do we go when we sleep? We all have memories of dreams, subconscious pictures, reflections, images, distorted ones of real life. But are these pictures so wrong? Why do we assume that our waking lives are the reality? Maybe our sleeping life is tuned into the real world.

That’s why I liked one fantasy book very much, that was half dream, half real. That dreamy land of the surreal is a neat place, and reflective of our psychology. Lots of people have written about dreams. The ballet is so often dreamy, a place of dreams. I think, for instance, of Swan Lake, where the young male dancer dreams of his snow queen, and the dark queen dances into his dreams and he dances with her in a beautiful dreamy sequence of movements. The whole of ballet is like a dream, much more so than opera. Opera is full of heart flesh, guts. It is visceral and in your face. But ballet is distant, dreamy, ethereal.

I once played a fairy in a Gilbert and Sulllivan play called Iolanthe. The play opens with we fairies lying on the stage with that dreamy, fairy mist floating above us. How many sets use that stage gas to create a misty atmosphere? I wonder what its made of, anyway. The chief fairy, I recall. Her real name was Gretchen, waved her little wand at each of us and woke us up. The effect was very dreamy.

Another dreamy scene, I recall from the novel, Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,”. In it, the young heroine is caught between the world of dreams and a beautiful yet tragic awakening. Then scene occurs in a drawing room where an older woman is playing Chopin. There is not much dreamier than Chopin. If one closes one’s eyes, one leaves the planet for a few minutes to join the fairies and dance about heaven for a while. Maybe that’s what happens when we fall asleep.