Memorable Sleeps: In Public

Everyone is chattering about $60,000 mattresses, high-thread-count sheets, and timed-release Ambien. But all the beds in the advertisements are empty. Or populated with refreshed-looking awake people. Or a human in obviously-not-real sleep, with nicely arranged hair. 

That's because the act of sleep itself is deeply, deeply private.

Not that you haven't done it in public. Oh yes. You have fallen asleep on the bus, in a friend's car, during a budget meeting, in church. You have swayed into the aisle and jerked awake. You have dreamed of animal sounds and slowly realized the noise is real, and issuing from your own throat. You have sat upright and pretended to have been dusting your lapel for ten minutes. Your friend (a true friend) has seen what your mouth looks like when it's all slack, and she has never mentioned that fact.

"SLEEP seems to be a state that we are all of us ashamed of, and which many people appear to regard as little less than criminal. If it were not so, why should we deny with an intensity approaching irritation, when discovered drowsing, that we have been asleep? Our unwillingness to be found asleep lies in the fact that then we are off our guard, and in the power of the wakeful."

It's odd: You could have been standing there on the train in jeans hanging from your groin bones; you could have been kissing someone passionately, or putting on mascara, or even clipping your fingernails for Lord's sake (I hope you don't clip your fingernails in Grand Central) and thought nothing of it. But it's hard to imagine even a near-naked, aggressively passionate rider on Metro North not feeling vulnerable coming to consciousness drooling into his tats.

So... what was going through my mind when, all those years ago while dating a man I'll call Mr Pantone Marker, I would fall asleep in the middle of parties?  There I was, curled up on a Barcelona chair, while some acquaintance the color of that film you get on hot milk went on about... what did his friends talk about? But I wasn't bored. Oh, no. I would fall asleep happily right in the middle of the music, the mixed nuts, the poker. Come to think of it, that was the time in my life I slept the most soundly.

If you've tried everything in the medicine cabinet and you're still sleepless, you might try cultivating a less fascinating life.

___

The quote is from "The Sinfulness of Sleep" by Junius Henri Browne, published in The Galaxy, Vol. V, Issue II, Feb., 1868.

Comments

I'd be curious to do a survey of how people manage to sleep at their desks. At a very old job (in the days of pulling all-nighters), I had a fairly corporate research job (well, I had to wear a tie), and when my eyelids became leaden I would prop my head up in one hand and hold a pen over a piece of paper in the other, pretending to be in deep thought, writing notes. Fortunately, my cubicle faced a window, so anyone passing only caught the "hard-working" side of me. The birds on the windowsill could see me soundly asleep.
Gleason.

[Nicole]

I taught a class last semester and there was an aggressive napper! One of those kids who sits in the back and pulls his hood way down, you know, to say "fuck you." But he probably wasn't sleeping.