Sleepless

I don’t sleep sometimes. Sometimes, I sleep almost through the night, for days at a time; and other times, I just don’t sleep. Or I sleep for a few hours, and then I’m awake at 2 and can’t fall back asleep.

Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.

Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.

*****

Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.

So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.

But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.

*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.

*****

At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.

I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.

*****