#SOL18 3-13-18 Hypnos & Morpheus

In WIld Mind, p.72, Natalie Goldberg suggests writing about sleep. “Sleep is the other half of our life,” she writes, “the underbelly. We should explore it.”

I think Karma is making me pay for years of bragging about my sleep. Now I am cursed to have to get up at some point almost every night to go to the restroom. And I only have one side that I can sleep on without pain.

Still, I love to sleep. I joke that I am a gifted sleeper. It irritates everyone in my family--which means my husband and my son. I recently asked my doctor about it. I said, “REM sleep is where you dream, right? And it’s supposed to take hours to get there? Well, I have dreams immediately after I fall asleep. And it’s like my dreams are on turbo fast forward. I have multiple elaborately detailed dreams in, at most, minutes.”
“You may think you have the dreams right away...:” she began.
“No, I KNOW I do. I go to bed. My husband finishes brushing his teeth. When he gets into bed he inadvertently awakens me and by that time I‘ve had several elaborate dreams.”
“Hm, I don’t know,” is all she said. I’m not sure she thinks Natalie Goldberg is right. She doesn't seem too interested in exploring sleep with me.

In college I told my first roommate that if she had an early class, she didn’t need to leave the room to blow dry her hair. It wouldn’t bother me. It didn’t take her long to believe me. A year later I was an Resident Advisor in the dorms. I was one of the last ones out during a fire alarm because I slept through it and only woke up when someone banged on my door.

Vivid and hallucinatory, I still remember some dreams years later. Places I’ve visited, conversations I’ve felt, and loves caught there eternally in dreamworld. For years my husband insisted he couldn’t remember his dreams. This, I also couldn’t understand. I felt like he was missing out on half of his life, heartbreaking to think of just slipping nightly into some sort of dreamless coma. When I got in the habit of getting up to go to the restroom I would sometimes catch him talking or yelling in his sleep. Then when I asked him about his dreams first thing in the morning, he remembered. Apparently he is constantly being chased by cougars, wolves, gators. For a next step I think we need to work on creating happier, less violent dreams for him.

The whole time he was growing up my son had trouble going to sleep and slept lightly. I couldn’t understand it at all. I kept trying to convince him of the genius of the trick my mother taught me: “Pretend you’re asleep and then you will be!” Apparently that doesn’t work for everyone. He told me recently that he used to hate it when I said that.

This post is my daily Slice of Life (#SOL18) and is a part of the annual March challenge hosted by Two Writing Teachers. According to Two Writing Teachers, a Slice of Life, or simply a “Slice,” is “a story about a small segment of someone’s day, a poem that tells about a small moment in time, a collection of words and photos that describes a scenario.”