“I can’t get no sleep”, says the song and I know how it feels.
“Deep in the bosom of the gentle night
Is when I search for the light
Pick up my pen and start to write”
I understand the urge, but this is not how it happens for me, mainly because I’m a stubborn bastard and generally because I can’t see a damn thing without the aid of glasses, and waking up, groping around and putting them on in the wee small hours seems like a lot of bother — so I don’t.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that it’s not the lack of sleep that is the problem, it’s the quality of the slumber that is causing the discomfort.
I get the required number of hours, but at the end, instead of feeling refreshed I feel like I have carried a large person up a steep incline. Sometimes I feel as though I have been fighting and running continuously from the time my head hits the pillow to the time that the fucker with the chainsaw wakes me up (we have a variety of fuckers with chainsaws where I live).
Sleep is and has been for some time, the final (and often the only) refuge from the pain that the world can inflict — a sanctuary of warm embrace.
Part of me knows that it would be better if I woke up — woke everyone up, and wrote, but another part of me just wants to sleep, have fantastical adventures, right wrongs and feel invincible — all things that sleep and dreams can deliver.
Maybe, one night I will try, ‘searching for the light, picking up my pen and write’ but in the meantime, I’m going to pull the covers up tight and do my best to drift off to where there is a possibility of that golden light that makes all things bright.
araneus1 