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When you attempt to overcome the effects of a sleepless night by downing a large coffee, you simply create a wide-eyed zombie. One night recently—for no reason at all, I tell you!—I forgot how to sleep. My eyes were closing as I gave up on a boring book and turned off the light at 9:30. At 10:15 I conceded that sleep was not happening, even though I had been drifting off while reading (note to self: choose a more interesting book next time).
Being fresh out of library books at my bedside, I went to my husband's lifetime collection of noir mysteries (he doesn't read them; he just collects them). I grabbed the first title I came across: a collection of Raymond Chandler's four "best" novels—and I began reading "The Big Sleep", which apparently I had never read.
An hour later, falling asleep in spite of my engagement with Philip Marlowe, I turned off the light again and closed my eyes. After some minutes of conscious breathing and other tricks, I did fall asleep.
When DinoVino came to bed sixty minutes later, I woke up. And that was when I really did forget how to sleep. I lay for an hour, doing my best "why me?, why now?" whine (and trying to drown that out by breathing, breathing). At 1:22 (aren't digital clocks great?) I put on my heavy robe and went to the media den where I immersed myself in "The Big Sleep": tough-guy talk, guns that go off (or maybe don't), smart PI who knows where all the bodies are buried.
An hour later I tried the bed again.
That's when I finally conceded that not only had I forgotten how to sleep but I might never re-learn it. Behind me was a lifetime of good sleeping. I have been the kind of sleeper who cries "insomnia!" if it takes longer than three minutes to drift off. And now it's gone. Maybe this is a memory thing. Maybe this forgetting is all of a piece with forgetting what week it is (which happened to me on Monday) or forgetting to send a thank-you note to a neighbour. Not to mention forgetting everything. Let's just leave it at that. Every. Thing.
I lay in bed, breathing, nudging my husband when he breathed too noisily, trying not to fret about—well, about all the worrying things there are in life, such as the state of the world. How could I sleep when boats full of migrants were capsizing? When war and brutality were forcing innocent victims to submit to coercive human traffickers in order to escape? When governments everywhere are sinking into the dark side? When commerce is replacing community? When children . . . Oh. Now I see why I couldn't sleep. Too busy saving the world in my head.
Eventually I did fall asleep. Eventually I woke up, my head filled with cotton wool. Any of the previous day's thoughts were fully muffled by the kapok between my ears. My head was a stuffed animal.
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