Perchance To Dream

At my age it’s safe to say I have slept for about thirty years. And that doesn’t include nodding off trying to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Imagine what I’ve missed. Yet sleep is not a waste of time. I could live without the philosophers but not without sleep, perchance to dream.  

There used to be a commercial for Preparation H telling us that while we slept our hemorrhoids shrank. I wouldn’t know about that but I’m sure my engine gets charged, my entrails realigned, and my all-night laundry recycled. I may wake with bafflements unbaffled as yesterday’s dangling threads find morning clarity. More often, dreams are unremembered or unopened gifts, a light too bright to see. Those rapid eye movements probe my shuttered chambers, yielding no more than a glimpse into the fertile turmoil.

Thirty years is more time than John Keats lived or possibly Mozart was awake. One wonders what operas and odes visited their nocturnal hours. It was their genius to reassemble the shards.

For many of us easeful sleep gets more elusive as we age. Dozing off on the recliner with a book on my lap seems to have no connection with my head on a pillow in bed. It’s my inalienable right, isn’t it? No, it’s more like a gift bestowed randomly.

Mantras have never helped. My most recent one was Beaujolais. The last syllable had the promise of transport, but I probably would have done better drinking it.

Most nights I drift off with wings sprouting from my shoulders but then there are those occasions when yawns are nowhere near, and my waking brain is firing off its synapses. When the river is churning, all I can do is trust the raft will eventually find an unimpeded stream.