sleep | Thornfield Hall

It’s not as hard as you might think, living in a city. You were blissful in the university town where you loved your studies and made many friends, but you were all kicked out en masse after you finished your degrees.

You donned a smart dress, or a suit (it was the age of suits), flats instead of walking shoes, flew to a strange city, took a taxi, and finally ended up in a headmaster’s office for the interview. We chatted about whatever popped into this charming man’s mind. (Hint: it wasn’t movies! He head never heard of Half Moon Street, Slapshot, or the screwball comedy classic, The More the Merrier.) The assistant head plied me with tea in a china cup and saucer, and gave me two Pepperidge Farm cookies. And then they hired me for the job.

In this beautiful city, I went to art museums, saw The Birds at a theater, frequented a bookstore and record shop near my apartment and nerdily attended a lecture on Hesiod.

Anyway, my husband (then boyfriend) found a job in another city, where we could live more cheaply. After we got married by a Justice of the Peace – it was moving, because it was just us and the words – we drove the Ryder truck to our new home.

Having lived in cities for many years, my husband was pragmatic about the ups and downs. At that time, the supermarkets were closed on Sunday. This was, indeed, a strange custom for a city.

I took the optimistic view of life in this city. “Well, it’s gray. I like gray. Do you suppose it’s like Seattle?” My husband roared with laughter. “Good one!” He may have thought I was joking…

And then I decided to get tough about it. “At least all the s___ is on the surface,” I said daringly.

He put a wrestler’s hold on me before turning it into a hug.”Well, I would say there are sewers, too.”

Everything was perfect at first. We loved our duplex, were able to walk to the grocery store, and the lake was only a mile away.

And then the alley took on a new life.

Every night, night after night, people partied in the alley and took drugs. I have trouble sleeping anyway, and the parties kept me awake. I got up one night while my husband slept to ask if they could take the party elsewhere.

I’ve always been a peaceful person. but there are limits. I started to cry as I made my request.

A thin, careworn, saucer-eyed, middle-aged man muttered, “Sorry, dear. You look like you could use some sleep.” They duly left their “camp” and went somewhere else. Whenever I saw him afterwards, we nodded Hello. One day, we sat together on the bus, and told each other our stories. He was an emergency room doctor. “It pays well and no one wants to work there.” And then he looked at my tired eyes. “I advise you to get more sleep.’

He was right. Sleep matters! My job was exhausting. I loved the work, but felt I did nothing but commute back and forth (two trains, a bus, and a brisk walk),.

And things changed: I found other work that I loved. That is the key to happiness at certain stages of life, and I look back at that time fondly.

Some would say that there is no grammar of sleep. I would have to disagree. I often parse the grammar of sleep. These “dream” narratives are driven by moods of verbs: the indicative mood of the verb (“I read”), the subjunctive mood (“I would read”), the infinitive mood (“to read); and the imperative mood (“Read!”)

Struggle 26 is one of my common sleep narratives. The first time I opened this “book,” I tossed and turned. Couldn’t I escape the struggle in the dream, before my whole life became a struggle? Because when you struggle to sleep, when you’ve tried everything, when you’ve eaten turkey as a sleep aid, drunk warm milk, done yoga, and nothing works? You would be surprised at how lack of sleep slows your responses.

Struggle 26: I struggled over whether to stay in a college town I loved, completely resigned to underemployment, or move to a city to become an underpaid professional. Which choice did I make? Was it a good choice? Was it the wrong choice? Can “I struggle” become “I refuse to struggle”? Should “I struggled” have become “Keep struggling!”?

Struggle 26 was neither a dream nor a narrative. It was the imperative of a verb, a command: “Struggle!”

Mind you, these sleep narratives are not real books, and have a different meaning for every “reader.” They are dream books. They form a kind of narrative of sleep, if sleep had a narrative, which is improbable, nay, impossible, if your dreams ramble like mine. Dreams do not tell what I call a coherent story. They are more like broken myths. They make half sense, have a half life.

A dream I have had over and over I call The House of Sleep. Perhaps it was the house of sleep because I seldom got there. In my first dream I opened a book. It was an old-fashioned album, filled with pictures of houses I’d never seen, captions I’d never read. The first picture: I am sitting in front of a cottage on a beach, cackling over a book. Judging from the laughter, it is Cornelius Otis Skinner’s The Ape in Me.

But then I turned a page and was panicked by a photo of myself, older, silver-haired, unrecognizable, in fact, except for my awareness that this was, or would be my future self. I was surrounded by lexicons and grammars, translating a cache of lovely new Latin poetry discovered by an archaeologist (were the poems real, or fake?) and given to me to read. But when that task was done, I would be given clay tablets written in a nonexistent, magical language. Why me? Why why why? Tolkien? Star Trek? What was I thinking?

Then I realized I could translate the nonsense if I MADE MY WAY TO A 24-HOUR GLASS RECTANGULAR EXTERIOR SMOKING LOUNGE at Indiana University Library, where I did some of my best work.

This lounge, however, no longer exists.

And then I remember my most important dream: Struggle 26.