Sleep, Perchance

What can happen when we open the door to the undefined, when we let our first thoughts or instincts take the lead? Set a timer for 5 minutes and just write. Don’t worry about it making sense or being perfect.

Lately I’ve been having trouble falling asleep, no matter how exhausted I am. My eyes may feel heavy, my brain befogged, and yet the slumber does not arrive. I set a timer to take a short nap. Just need a quick reset, I think. But my brain wanders: to tasks undone, anxieties yet uncalmed, bits of trivia I feel an urgent need to confirm. Soon I’m thumbing through random Google searches and social media posts. And then the sleep wanders off, too.

“Lately” may be a poor descriptor, given how long I’ve struggled to fall asleep. I remember being only a handful of years old and waking up my parents (usually my dad) to inform them of some elaborate reason why I could not possibly go to sleep. My bedsheets at this age are canine-themed, with paw-printed fabric and a fluffy black-and-white sheepdog (not unlike our own Mandy) adorning the pillowcase.

“Dad,” I whisper from around the corner. “I can’t sleep. There’s a dog in my room.”

“Why is Mandy in your room?”

“It isn’t Mandy. It’s a different dog.”

He stumbles in to groggily investigate. I point to pillow. I smile at my cleverness. This is, perhaps, the first joke I have ever told, but my weary audience is having none of it.

“Meredith, go to sleep.”

It never worked when my dad ordered me to do it. So I suppose it makes sense, some twenty-five years or more later, that barking the same order to myself yields similar results.

“Meredith, go to sleep,” I repeat in my head, in the throes of exhaustion but unable to turn of the spigot-of-consciousness.

“I wonder if I could still find those old bedsheets on Google,” the defiant, anti-sleep version of myself claps back. “Better pull out the phone and check. Or else you’ll never be able to fall asleep.”