Ode to Sleep
Sleep is an act of trust, inherent in all living things. We have a prayer plant, (maranta leuconeura), who retracts its leaves at night and unfolds them every morning.
I love to sleep. If I could do it twelve hours a day, I would but one of my greatest absurdities is that I struggle to sleep. I admire people who can crawl into bed, close their eyes, let it all go, and just sleep. I need medication to do that.
I wear a Fitbit to track my cycles through sleep, from light to deep to REM. I fall quickly into deep sleep, (likely because I’m sleep deprived), but don’t stay there long. Worrying about whether I got enough sleep or not is a central preoccupation in my life because I struggle so much with it. I study my sleep pattern over coffee every morning, make note of the up and down rhythm of my journey through sleep cycles. I’ve read a lot about it. I even paid $450 for a sleep study to tell me nothing more than my Fitbit does.
Here is what happens when we sleep:
When we first fall to sleep, we enter in a phase of non-REM sleep where our brain activity, muscles, and eye movements begin to slow down. During the first stage of sleep, we might experience a sudden contraction of muscles, called the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk is what makes you feel like you’re falling. I have an early memory of this as a kid. I left the experience certain I’d trespassed dimensions and was falling from a skyscraper before returning to my twin bed and Raggedy Ann and Andy quilt.
If you can get past the hypnic jerk, eye movements stop, body temperature falls, and heart rate slows. Fitbit calls this Light sleep, but it’s all part of non-REM sleep which is critical to health. It’s when our bodies repair themselves, from bone to organ, and our immune systems do a lot of work for us.
From there, you may slip into deep sleep, which is my favorite of non-REM sleep. I like waking up from a deep sleep, when the house is dark and cool, disoriented, and unsure how much time has passed, unsure where I am or why I am there. I feel tremendous relief my consciousness has receded so far away from my awareness. It all always comes rushing back, but in those few moments, I’m no one at all and nothing concerns me.
Unfortunately, as you age, your body gets less non-REM sleep. It’s probably our brain’s way of fighting against the waning edges of our awareness. There is so much to see, process, and understand. As I get older, I certainly feel like there is no time to waste.
During REM sleep, brain activity is more like it is when you’re awake. This is the sleep cycle that produces the most vivid dreams. Memory consolidation occurs during REM sleep. That’s when your brain transfers short term memory from the hippocampus into longer term, permanent memories in the pre-frontal cortex. I imagine my brain like a computer during this phase, saving files to the cloud, while playing a YouTube video and scrolling Twitter.
Without regular sleep, we age prematurely, are at risk of developing all manner of disease, from heart to kidney, diabetes to depression. The longest anyone has ever stayed awake was seventeen-year-old Randy Gardner, in 1963, for eleven days and twenty-five minutes. You can never outrun sleep, no matter how hard you try.
There are biological consequences for not sleeping. Memory is impaired. Cognition slows. Your body forces “micro-sleeps” when you’ve been awake for too long, and often, you are not even aware of them. You’re more prone to accidents. Eventually, if kept awake long enough, your organs will fail.
I once stayed awake for four days in my early twenties. After the second day, everything is a bit hazy, like I had too much to drink or smoked too much weed. When I finally collapsed, I recall the world darkening around the edges of my vision and the feeling of my consciousness retreating from the world.
When I woke, it was hard to return. I lived in an apartment in central Phoenix at the time and I can still see the light coming in the window, the pattern of it against my bedspread. It was the summer of 1999. It was the first time I realized that being alive could be a burden and sleep was a reprieve from it. I’d never stay up so long again.
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Sleeping is as much a biological imperative as eating. But sleeping well is a privilege and hinges upon having safety and shelter to do so. When I worked at the library and encountered people experiencing homelessness, what struck me the most profoundly was their fatigue. They could never just sleep.
Providing for good sleep should be the foundation of any civilization. If we did that, we’d have the groundwork to eradicate all our worst problems. War, poverty, abuse, homelessness makes real rest impossible. If you’re in a place in life where you can curl up in a bed, pull up the covers, close your eyes, and trust in your safety enough to sleep, life may still not be perfect, but it likely has the foundation to keep getting better.
When I adopt a new dog, they sleep for days when they realize they’re safe. Shamus, a fifteen-year-old dachshund mix, slept almost sixteen hours a day for three months once he settled into our home. He’d go to bed with and not get up until 11:00a.m. I’d wait for him to trot up the hallway, toes tip tapping, tail wagging, happy to see me and wanting breakfast. Before us, his stress levels had been so significant sleep must have had eluded him. Pepper and Lucy, a bonded pair I took in from a shelter in Kentucky, slept all day but to eat for a month after they came home to me.
Sleep is also the most private time available to us. Sleep and dreams are free from social demands and expectations. Unless we share our dreams, as I have with you, no one can ever know of them. Sleep and dream belong only to us. It is the dividing line between the parts of us we must share with the world to survive and our innermost thoughts, fears, and desires.
Dream time is rich with lore, reflective of the dominant culture’s view of reality. For us, living in the twenty-first century, sleep is measured by cycles on smart devices, syncing even our dream time to digital data we can interpret through a scientific worldview. For ancient cultures, dreams foretold, haunted, spoke to a realm of wonder and enchantment.
Sleep is an act of trust, inherent in all living things. We have a prayer plant, (maranta leuconeura), who retracts its leaves at night and unfolds them every morning. The divine intelligence within trusts the sun will rise the next day. Letting go and falling into sleep is an act of deep trust. Sleep is a little death from which we awake, symbolic of all the moments psychological disintegration and reintegration we undertake in our lives.
From my own experience, insomnia generates a kind of despair it’s hard to articulate. Anxiety, worry, and existential terror can bleed into my capacity to retreat into sleep and dream. During the darkest times in my life, sleep eluded me. When I am not able to trust the natural order of things, and life has shifted me far outside my natural rhythms, I am unable to rest and let go, I know crisis looms.
Wishing you good dreams only.