Adagio
Sleep
comes as a welcome repose to most people, cushioning with its soft, restoring
arms. To others, it stalks, waiting for them
to let their guard down, and forever readying its grim fingers for the
night. The rest live in uneasy balance,
shifting between the two.
I
belong to the last group. My nights are
at times, to say the least, quite eventful.
These nights can be pure hell, as sleep comes, but only in stabbing
fits. Desperately needing sleep, my body
and mind give up to what some can consider the slumber of the damned. The rest of the night is plagued by. . . something.
Vision is almost certainly a part of it, but is (likely for the best)
never recalled. Not even the aural
senses live past waking. But the
sensation of dread almost always lasts well into the day, or days following, at
times. An unreasonable* dread,
admittedly, but dread nonetheless.
The
nights in which I rest easily do come, of course. But true rest is a rarely sighted catfish, in
the great saltwater lake of life. It
almost never happens, and the hope of seeing one dies pretty quickly. But when it does, I honestly feel like it’s
possible I might have died, and gone to some proverbial heaven**. That, or I might
have finally been allowed to get a couple hours of truly deep sleep. Maybe I did something right on those days.
It’s
not likely, though.
*Actually, it’s those very
unreasonable qualities that lend dread its weighty presence. Dread is almost never logical, it just
is. It’s quite possibly the most
impossible feeling, as it’s truly a fear of the unknown, and the unknown is
essentially nonexistent until proven otherwise.
**No funny ideas, read something else
to see what I mean.