Before Falling Into the Deep Well of Sleep

But first. I’ve had a difficult time coming here to post this apolitical post. So much now needs to be said, not hidden and mistaken for complacency or complicity. Last week as I stood with others listening to my representative Hank Johnson stirring us to action at the march, I watched the puffs of our breaths in the cold winter air as we called out “good trouble,” voices resolute, and tears came to my eyes because I couldn’t believe that this moment had come to me. I never expected that in my lifetime I would be called to fight for democracy, for basic human rights against fascism and authoritarianism. Yet, here it is. And so I speak here too, to add my voice, to speak out against the lies. I will not be crushed by fear or succumb to despair, and I hope that you are with me.

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And so, on with my thoughts about the not-so-sleepy nights and twilights when the childhood mind begins to journey.

Taken from “My Very First Mother Goose” book illustrated by Rosemary Wells

I think we’ve all heard the advice that if you have trouble sleeping, you should develop a bedtime ritual. Take a warm bath or shower, dim the lights, read a little, breathe deeply, put on some white noise like distant rain sounds. I don’t hear much about counting sheep. Just as well, I could never imagine the sheep anyway. Where were they supposed to be? Flying over my head one by one, or grazing on a hillside? Were they cartoon sheep or real wooly sheep that smelled sheep-y?

When I was a kid, for years I had a strict school days bedtime. Eight o’clock. I wasn’t necessarily sleepy then, but by parental order, I had to lie in bed and wait for oblivion to descend. This was especially terrible in the early fall just as the school year began. I had to be in bed while other kids were still outdoors playing. I could hear them shouting to each other, laughing, and kicking the can. So unfair!

I developed my own little rituals to help me fall asleep, ones I’ve never yet heard from an expert. I would lie there and pretend I was a girl in a hayloft, in a cozy little bed under the eaves. Below me was one big room with a grand fire in a stone fireplace with a kettle of soup or coffee set to warm, and a long rustic table where my grandfather (not my actual, real grandfather, but a grandfather in this fairy tale of mine) and I often ate warm bread and cheese. Of course, this was mostly some version of Heidi pasted into an amalgam of fairy tale elements. Sometimes Peter the goat boy came to visit me in the loft. He would stand at the top of the ladder and we would talk. I would think about the fireplace and the snow outside and goats and cozy hay until I eventually fell asleep.

Interestingly, my mother recently told me that she had a little story too that came to her while she waited for sleep to fall. In the town where she lived there was a large building that at one time was a home for orphaned boys, though by the time she became aware of it, it was closed. While she lay in bed waiting for sleep, she would imagine she lived in that building among the orphans. She was the only girl there and each day she had a new dress. She imagined that she made all the dresses by herself on her very own sewing machine. (I found this story quite amusing as my memories of my mother and her sewing machine mostly involve frustration and camouflaged cussing—think con sarn! dag nabbit!)

Isn’t it interesting though, the places our child minds traveled when we sought for calm in a dimly lit room with the subtle noises of other people moving around on the other side of the wall? We had our secret stories, a little place to go and turn over and polish like a precious stone. I’d never known till this Christmas that my mother too had a place like this in her imagination. That she too had lain in bed as a child and waited for sleep.

I impose my bedtime on myself now because I have to be up with the moon, and I am always ready to stretch out and surrender though often, I do not make it through the night without waking to the roar of my over-active brain. Then of course, I don’t count sheep, or imagine talking to anybody about any kind of caprinae. I’m guessing my sleepless mother no longer finds calm in showing off imagined dresses in an orphan home.

But I wonder, are these little journeys in the mind’s eye common? Do many children do this before they fall asleep?

My imaginings show me my early instinctive narrative leanings. Surely, not all children are like this. Or are they?

What did you “daydream” about at night, in that twilight time before you fell fully down the well of unconscious dreaming? Do you remember?

Photo by D. Muse