Toward the end of January my post-flu need for a lot more sleep merged with the onset of extreme cold to become a semi-hibernatory pattern. No more hauling up in the dark hours before dawn; it was just too damn cold and my body could not deal.
Not to say that the sleep I was engaging in was always the most reposing. My life is a bit too choppy to, ah, dream of that. But some dreams are sweet indeed, the kind that seem more real than life itself, resting in the fibers of your body after waking. A touch, a voice, a feeling. Sometimes my mother, sometimes a friend through time, a lover past, a lover possible. Dreams to go to sleep for.
We resist sleep, society on the go that we are, driven to distraction by all our gadgets. But now whether I wanted to succumb to the incoming fog or not there was little choice. It felt like I might collapse if I resisted. Often it takes being ill, or terribly jet lagged, or worse, to appreciate the sweetness that is sleep.
Oh sleep, how little we know ye. Shakespeare was way ahead of us. Hear it from Macbeth, no longer able to find solace in sleep:
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
And one of my favorite images of all time, invoking Penelope at the loom Walter Benjamin suggested that perhaps our dreams are the true weave of reality while our waking hours are the stuff to forget.
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? … And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
Come what may: sweet dreams.