Perchance to Dream.

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

Didn’t sleep well last night, something that happens every so often.  My mind was awake chewing its cud far too late, so sleep got shoved in a corner and never fully took hold.  I flipped this way and that, got up and remade the bed, said hello to our little cat (who had been thrashing around above the ceiling chasing something real or imaginary), hit the bathroom at least twice and finally gave into being fully awake around 2 am, after which I occupied myself with pondering and prayer and probably stayed awake longer than I might have had I not been mesmerized by a preacher on the radio who talked about blessing others.

I woke up in the morning an hour later than usual, still sleepy but oddly refreshed, turned on my device to see if the world had come to an end while I was away and found an essay by one of my favorite writers, Jill Carattini, managing editor of A Slice of Infinity (blog) at Ravi Zacharias International.  Jill makes me think, her theology is strong and she’s a darned good word slinger. This time around, ironically, her subject was sleep, so I dove right in rather than put off reading her piece ‘til later in the day.

Some people describe a “sense of foreboding in the still of night that is irrationally paralyzing,” she wrote, citing the example of NPR personality Ira Glass, who was scared to go to sleep as a child. He equated the “fear of not being awake” to the fear of not being, because “sleep seemed no different than death … You were gone.  Not moving, not talking, not thinking. Not aware. What could be more frightening?” Glass said. “What could be bigger?”

I don’t get that.  Sleep has always been a solace for me.  There’s great relief, almost joy, in letting go of the day and drifting off to dreamland. Guess that’s why I like naps so much, a habit modeled by my mother, who took a 20-minute snooze every day at 2 o’clock, and woe be it to any of us brothers foolish enough to wake her. Had the house been on fire, we might have tried to put the thing out ourselves rather than take a chance on interrupting her nap. Whether nap or night, I find sleep welcoming, just as Mom may have in seeking brief relief from four active boys. Most times, I can put down my reading, fluff up the pillow and fall asleep in a few minutes. Without worry. In fact, sleep and I have had so good a relationship that it’s never occurred to me that some people fear sleep like they fear death.  As Jill Carattini points out in her essay, we as a culture are “generally uncomfortable with death and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us.” I know people like that, who must keep energized and entertained lest the chill side of their minds whisper quietly about what may happen after they die. But others appear to brush off the specter of death and sleep very well. “You die, then it’s oblivion,” one friend told me with a shrug.  The possibility of a heavenly afterlife with the Lord of Light was simply dismissed.

When we were small, Mom instructed us to get on our knees before tucking us into bed. We prayed for each other, our parents and our pets and recited the little 18th century ditty, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I found the notion that God might sneak into our room and snatch one of us up during the night a bit discomfiting – but no more than thinking about what might have been lurking under the bed.   
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Shakespeare conflates sleep and death as Hamlet considers suicide in the wake of family treachery: “To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream--ay, there’s the rub,” he declares. But even dreaming seems no more promising to the prince than the “heartache and thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.” The Bard himself, by the way, appears to have had more confidence in a beneficent Christian afterlife than his sweet Prince, as revealed in the playwright’s Last Will and Testament: “I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, that through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting, and my body to the earth whereof it is made.” 
 
As Ms. Carattini writes, “(T)o admit there is no escaping the enemy of death is not to say we are left without an ally,” citing the claim in John 11: 25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, shall live.”
 
“The one who made this claim,” the essayist concludes, “made it knowing that death would come to all of us, but (did so) longing to show the world that it is an enemy he would defeat. Perhaps sleep, then, providing a striking image of finite bodies that will lie down and cease to be, can simultaneously provide us a rousing image of bodies that will rise again.”
 
Now there’s the rub!

Read Jill’s essay here: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxvzKknhLPsNBRlzGCgcQjKcnGSK0

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