Walking into the Deep Mystery of Sleep

Sleep has been elusive this past month. First there were the two weeks of jet lag, when I unpacked my bags and waited for all my cells to arrive back home. As I tried to drift off, rich sensory images of the East re-visited me, providing entertainment. But not sleep. I have long had a habit of mining the in-between of re-entry to arrive home with new eyes, to notice what I might have missed before. So my mind has been plenty busy with that a good part of the night.  

This is largely because I immediately realized that my home itself had changed in my absence. The jitteriness all around me was immediately palpable, and this feeling of being on tenterhooks has led up to the election that is taking place as I write. This contagious worry and fear and dread has circulated like an arctic current for the last month, and the hope is that some of it will be alleviated when the polls close tonight.

For me, soothing has come from Medieval mystics, like Julian of Norwich, who famously wrote “all will be well, and all will be well, and all matter of things shall be well.” Except she didn’t write those exact words because she was the first woman to write a book in Middle English. Who knew? What has helped is knowing the world around her was far darker and crazier than ours, and yet her vision was of an unseen future far more hopeful than the plagues and burnings happening all around her.

And then there are visionaries from our time, like Arlie Hochschild, whose interview on On Being has sustained me through this election cycle.

These are the things I remember when I’m writing this, upright in the middle of the day. But the way into sleep is far more mysterious. I wrote this right after my first good night’s sleep, as a way to remember how the back door works. And where the story REALLY begins. It’s a deep story of dreaming, of healing, and of mystery. May you find yours.

 No. Don’t start there. What can dreams tell us anyways?

Some woman. No. Two women following a man climbing a tree.

What? I said: Don’t start there.

Something else beckoned. Some place she could start that was warm.

No. Not warm. Warmer and warmer. Warmest.

Where is that place, a place fit for starting? She wondered aloud this time.

Damn fools in the world, always wanting to get started, she thought, staring up at the faint glow of dark reminders above her head. She had carefully placed them there many years ago as a frazzled young mother, needing a hint, a small spark, some reminder of the dark mysteries just on the other side of the roof.

But now, on her fourth night of lying there flat on her back, she needed not one more freaking reminder of possibilities, mysteries, or anything else. Her brain was already in a lawnmower loop, starting, starting, like someone found the cord to get it going and just kept pulling it again, again, again. What she needed, longed for really, was a way to get herself stopped. To unpull the incessant over-pulled cord of her demanding imagination.

What advice could some dream give me that would resolve this state of affairs? She wondered aloud again. Oops. There she was pulling that same damn cord again.

The cord, the cord, the red cord, tied like a bow, or maybe a fishing hook, dangling just beyond reach. She moved toward it, felt herself sliding down toward the water, shimmying back up, sliding down again.

She let herself drift, and she landed on a raft, a blue, blue raft in a dark grey sea, then holding on to it and bobbing in the warm warm water. The water that held the whale with the warm warm belly, which is where this story really begins.