Curtained Sleep
By Cait Scollin (@caitscollin.x)
The thing is, I keep falling asleep at the tv, which I know I haven’t done before. As long as I’ve known, I’ve been a sort of bed-by-half-eleven person. An eyes-wide-open until the lights turn off sort of person. Then— then it’s not on me anymore? Sleep itself I can’t tell you about. I mean, we all know it. If we all have one thing in common, it has to be that. From me to you to people living in caves… It must be the same for everyone. The same witchcraft that ritually transfixes us, night after night, tumultuous, shadowy, sticky. For years, artists and writers have spoken of “Death, and his brother Sleep.” Is sleep a kind of dying? Dipping your toe into some eternal water, and snatching it back before it pulls you in. Generally, I try not to think about this. No use tempting fate with metaphor, but I sometimes catch myself pre-dream, with closed eyes, falling deeper and deeper into something until I jolt. And I have my sigh of relief and I shrug it off, but in the morning I dwell on it. What was that? The falling gives me pause because I can’t help but imagine what lies below me. Or even worse, if there is nothing there at all. What if, to be trapped in sleep, or trapped in death, is just descending, down, down, with darkness in abundance and no hope of ever actually landing. Maybe it’s like being lost, or maybe everything else is the same, except you start to lose yourself.
I’m not sure if death can be good. Then again, it’s a mystery to me. According to some of these half-dead people, it’s ok. But I’m terrified of it. It’s the absurd, the unknown, the absence of everything. But I think it’s the mystery that really gets to me. Everything else in the world is known, or knowable. Secrets abound, sure, but they’re not as impossible to understand. Life and death could just be two sides of the same coin, and we might not even be phased by it in the long (everyone is different about this, you probably think I’m getting it all wrong. There are those people, right, who die and come back? Maybe for minutes, their heart stops, you think they’re gone. What do they see? Does the modern Lazarus have any more insight than the rest of us? I’ve read about this bright light and guardian angels and hurtling through space. I’ve heard it called ‘sleeplike’. One man said that, for him, it was like hitting the snooze button when you wake (Knowing there’s something not right, knowing you’re only a little conscious, knowing the world goes on around you while you are stuck within yourself. He said it was peaceful). Some of them said that they just didn’t want to wake up.
I’m not sure if death can be good. Then again, it’s a mystery to me. According to some of these half-dead people, it’s ok. But I’m terrified of it. It’s the absurd, the unknown, the absence of everything. But I think it’s the mystery that really gets to me. Everything else in the world is known, or knowable. Secrets abound, sure, but they’re not as impossible to understand. Life and death could just be two sides of the same coin, and we might not even be phased by it in the long (long) run. And then there’s sleep, that younger brother of death, the nicer version, or maybe the craftier one. Because, in my head, at least for now, sleep is a glimpse into what awaits us all at some point. It opens the curtain, albeit foggy with dry ice or celestiality. At some point, the curtain closes behind us and we’re gone. And others are trapped in its velvet grip, comatose, momentarily dead. The only thing I know for certain is that there is nothing I can ever do to stop it.
Painting "Sleep and His Half-Brother Death" by John William Waterhouse