Nocturnal Thoughts

Here I am thinking great thoughts when I should be dreaming great dreams. If this continues, I might as well get a job at an all-night Arco station. You would think I’d have this concept of sleep down to perfection by now.  I’ve slept nearly thirty years of my allotted time yet I’m getting worse at it.

As a baby I don’t recall any difficulties in my crib.  I slept through the dust bowl, breadlines and Hitler. Even growing up stumbling and bumbling along I could always count on the mattress to carry me away. I used to conk out in dark theaters. If that was a melatonin rush, where have you gone, melatonin? What ever happened to my inner Chopin and his nocturnes?

I can carpe my diem but nights cannot be seized. Come to think of it, maybe I have been asleep. It is now 4:11 and two minutes ago it was 3:47. I can almost feel myself adrift but I have to pee. It sort of feels that way but maybe it’s just my enlarged prostate wanting attention. So get up and go, you fool. No, don’t go you’re final nodding off. Go. Stay. How can I sleep with this racket? Perhaps I’ve used up my sleep quotient and I’m doomed to stand as sentinel for this doomed planet.

I’m remembering a commercial for Preparation H which promised that our hemorrhoids would shrink as we slept. As far as I know I never had any but I suspect other great things happen such as the flow of creative juices and a clarity applied to daily predicaments. It remains for us to catch these butterflies with our own net.

Grant me some quality sleep. I don’t want to be up till the dawn’s early light. Now that has me dwelling on our national anthem and how much better we’d be with Woody Guthrie’s, This Land is Your Land rather than our bombastic drinking song about flag, and rocket’s red glare. The red, white and blue is our great signifier. After noting that it still waved the next morning it recorded our expansion by adding new stars for the next hundred years. The land of the free and home of the brave forgot to include the enslaved, unpropertied, indigenous people and women.

Signifiers are first cousins to metaphors. Too bad the anthem is bad poetry, I think to myself as I slip into REM sleep. I have essential dreams yet to be dreamt. Sleep, you genius of montage, take me. I’ll get my gossamer wings from the closet. Launch me weightless to nocturnal lunacy where all my unsolved shards can be reassembled, a mission too important to be left to waking hours. It should have been listed as one of those inalienable rights along with life and liberty. How can we pursue happiness without a good night’s sleep?