400 Words about Sleep

I don't know much about metaphysics; sleep however is a topic I know a bit about, at least in the same way one who spends their days on a farm knows about animals though they've never taken a zoology class.

I’ve been blessed with the ability to sleep well. I can fall asleep on a whim. As I grow older the locations and positions I can sleep in have decreased, but give me a bed and two minutes and I’m out. Struggling with sleep sounds horrible to me and is a thing I hope to never deal with. Unfortunately it’s probably a false hope, like hoping you never have to deal with losing friends, having your loved ones die, or dying yourself. One of the few times I lose sleep is when I’m worrying about that tragic day when it takes me an hour to fall asleep.

Clearly a key question is: how does one fall asleep? I’m not sure exactly. But I can say how one does not fall asleep and from that perhaps we can suppose how one falls asleep, even if we can’t nail down the physiology behind it. Outside of some “problems” with the brain there are two ways not to fall asleep: if your body is too uncomfortable or if your mind is racing, thinking about something. In regard to comfort I can testify to the importance of a good mattress, this is a thing that can’t be overrated in life. But at my age the bigger problem for most of the people I know is the mind--learning to turn it off. What should we think of a mind that can be turned off so quickly? Does its owner posses such great power over their body? Or does its owner actually NOT have a single important thing to think about? Does the owner have a conscious so clear there is no burden or guilt keeping them awake? Or do they have such a deep and profound apathy that the ills of the world, and their own, can’t penetrate whatever defenses they’ve placed around their minds?

Once, on Maui, I was probably 19, I slept on a hard floor in a sleeping bag; I put a CD in, skipped ahead to song number ten, hit the repeat button, and fell asleep to the sounds of a tropical rain storm and this. And life was brilliant.