Good night means that I hope you will sleep well, and wake up safely in the morning, and that nothing bad will happen to you.
Well, such as…I can’t think what sort of bad things might happen to you.
Good night.
–MaddAddam: A Novel/Margaret Atwood
Bed, bed I couldn’t go to bed
My head’s too light to try to set it down
Sleep, sleep I couldn’t sleep tonight
Not for all the jewels in the crown.
–My Fair Lady/I Could Have Danced All Night
I don’t know what it is, but I am always particularly sleepy this time of year.
Maybe it’s the cooler temperatures, maybe it’s the darker mornings, but in the late Summer and early Fall, I sleep more hours and more soundly than I do in the brighter, warmer months. That means something, because sleeping is something I’m generally good at any time of the year. In the Fall, I tend to go to bed a little earlier, fall asleep a little sooner, and sleep until it just isn’t decent.
Don’t hate me because I’m well rested.
Because sometimes I’m not! In spite of getting more sleep this time of year, I often feel sleepier during the day. I think it’s because in addition to sleeping a little more, I also have more dreams and the dreams I have are more likely to wake me up. Often, they’re spectacularly violent and bloody. If I’m lucky, they’re sexual. Sometimes, disturbingly, they are both.
So what?
Yeah, so what.
I don’t know.
I tend to think that the dreams must mean something because they are so vivid. Some of them can just be enjoyed, of course. No, I don’t mean the violent ones. If the dreams “must” mean something, then I feel like I need to take heed. Which means I wake up and take either real or mental notes about what happened in the dream. Usually it also means that I’m awake for a while trying to shake it off, especially if it was violent or upsetting in some way.
In spite of that, I’ve never been very successful in extracting meaning from dreams. In one especially grim recurring nightmare, children were being sexually tortured and flayed at the airport while I watched, unable to save them or to escape myself. I’m not even sure why I couldn’t escape, since all I had done was walk into a room that was supposed to be some sort of gallery. The children were the exhibit. My watching was part of the torture. In one especially horrifying version of the dream, the torturer tried to make me skin a child. Or rather, tried to persuade me. There was never any overt violence toward me. Being led into being complicit with such a monster was guaranteed to wake me up screaming, paralyzed and adrenaline-poisoned and completely unable to get back to sleep. But I never really figured out what it was really about. What did I feel like I was participating in that I needed to get away from? I have no idea now, and didn’t then. Eventually the nightmare stopped.
And I could sleep again.
Because I always do eventually.
Maybe the dreams don’t matter.
Maybe they do.
I just don’t know.