As I was putting my younger son to bed tonight (which involves me
hovering a room away, reminding him to do X, then Y, then Z, then Z, then Z,
and so on) the song "I'm Only Sleeping" by the Beatles drifted into
my head. I remembered all of it, much to my son's annoyance. Slow,
dreamy, in a minor key. (The only thing more annoying than the fact that not
every Beatles song is available on iTunes is the reason: Michael Jackson.)
I remember when I
discovered sleep as a teenager, which was kind of like discovering orgasms—a
world you could enter that was, finally, all your own.
A month ago I had
reached the point where several people were wringing their hands, concerned
about my lack of sleep. There was one five-day period in which I slept a total
of 4 hours, none of them sequential. The line between conscious and unconscious
thought became blurred for me, so that I began to lose touch with what was real
and what was like a dream—I would think it, so maybe it had happened, was
happening. Even now I don't have the words to frame what fading from my
own grasp felt like.
Then, overriding the
policies of AA and my pleading, a doctor insisted that I choose between taking
medicine to sleep or checking into a hospital so they could monitor me. I chose
the drugs. I called the doctor back the next morning and told him it didn't
work. "You're kidding," he said. I assured him I was not. He
prescribed something else, and told me to take Benadryl the next night on top
of that medicine. If that didn't work, he said, it was the hospital.
Whichever it was that
worked, the next night I slept for four hours. And the night after that,
longer. Then, within a few days, sleep and I fell back into the passionate love
affair we'd had when I was a teenager. We never wanted to be out of each
other's sight. I began to think of my bed with fervent lust; I'd walk past it
(I never bothered to make it, since I would pounce on it at any chance I had)
and check it out as if it was a hot guy.
When I brought this
up to the psychiatrist he cited the years of emotional exhaustion behind me.
Take it, he said. Just let it happen. He is of the belief that I sustained an
injury to my head, and that, like I did after my concussion as a kid, I needed
to sleep.
The sensation is much
more like the post-concussion experience, in that I still only sleep for chunks
of time, usually about 4 to 6 hours. But when I wake it is as if from under a
great and knowing weight, a delicious and unyielding comfort, as if I have fallen
into a feather bed six feet deep that's curled around me. It's not a drugged
feeling. Everything is warmth, and I want to get deeper in the warmth. When I
try to raise my head, a gentle hand presses me back down. Shhhhhh, someone
says.
And the dreams:
filled with light, and flying. One night I dreamed I had telekinesis. I started
out moving glasses of water around, and then realized I could make people fly.
I crashed them into things at first, but then got it. I figured out how to fly
myself, with them, while I slept.
