Sleepless

I had the thought recently that we’re asleep a lot of the time. Ideally I’d be asleep about 1/3 of my life, except if there was something in the waking world I really didn’t want to miss. But then there’s the sleeping world. It’s as though it doesn’t exist. Like eating food or going to the bathroom on Star Trek. Sleeping is hardly depicted in my mind, let alone in the books I read or the movies I see. We unconsciously eliminate from our own view what is unconscious, and sleep is such an obvious example. What if my favorite novels were occupied 1/3 of the time with depicting sleep states? What would that do to my appreciation of the world? The falling asleep, as you sink under, the disjointed dream images and efforts to make sense of them, then the moment when the bits of dream all begin to be a language of their own, not needing to be understood… then just sensation, broken by half waking and questions or touches,  a presence or absence in the bed, a touch, warm, or lack of touch, cold, then dreams again, evaluation, I’m afraid, I’m not afraid, optimistic, curious, and the looking at the clock as waking begins, the bargaining and clinging and resignation and rising. All that is as real as conversation or car chases or battles with monsters. I wonder what else is hiding in plain sight.