Sleep

Sometimes we say, “I should have stayed in bed.” Of course, many of us don’t mean it as if we should sleep. Whether we’re thinking of laying around watching television, or listening to music, or playing video games, we usually use the phrase in a general I’d-rather-be-doing-something-else way. The feeling is that something in the day has gone wrong and we’d rather start over. We’d rather have not even started.

Who knows? Staying in bed might be a good idea every once in a while to evade the pitfalls of life. How many pitfalls, calamities, and collisions can one person encounter in a life anyway? To avoid a couple of mishaps in one day among a year’s-worth of days sounds like a necessary principle. Everyone should have a day off from those events which make a person say, “I should have stayed in bed.”

Now, all this is not a dismissal of anyone who can’t get sleep. The insomniacs are out there, among society, and we should pity them. The poor, saggy-eyed, sleepless vampires are too far gone to be able to think coherently. They will say, “I should have stayed in bed,” and mean something completely different from the majority. They mean SLEEP! They mean: “I should have stayed asleep,” which never seems to happen for them. It’s their personal fantasy.

The sleepless make grouchiness look like innocence. An insomniac can get ornery because their mind is easily frustrated. They may find problems with everyone they meet. An insomniac will be judgy. They don’t necessarily want to be judgy even though it might seem that way. They really wish for everyone to get along. The insomniac wishes for world peace as much as they wish for inner peace.

The sleepless wish a bed had “majiks” inside to drag them down into a world of dreams. They wish for a slumber which satisfies. They wish for true sleep, the likes of which others take for granted. The insomniacs wish for a sleep which lasts long enough to make the hands on the clock move, otherwise they might wake up and it’s still the same time of day. They wish for deep sleep like deep darkness, like a consuming force which can overcome the adrenalin and the racing thoughts, like a smothering blanket inside the mind to choke out any repetitive scenarios.

An insomniac, if found with the day’s scenarios on the brain, will replay those scenarios until all sanity is debatable and all sleep is beyond capture.

A person on little sleep might begin typing and come up with something that looks like thisalkdas, because their head tilted forward while their hands were still on the akeyboardaljf. No need to proofread that stuff. Just get the typist some sleep. Have them start over tomorrow.

Tell them: “You should have stayed in bed.”