Sleeping Through The Noise

The barrier between sleep and awake is both fragile and strong.

I can sleep through a storm outside, but if the furnace makes any kind of weird buzz, I’m awake instantly. Even a non-intrusive alarm ringtone pierces the veil.

Sleep has always been rather mysterious to me. Where do we go when we’ve gone to sleep? How can time seem to pass so quickly?

I became determined, when I was 5, to catch myself falling asleep. Of course, I was never successful, but isn’t it kind of strange that it’s impassible to notice the moment we fall asleep, no matter how hard we try?

Perhaps it’s death, simulated every night. Which is another mysterious event that we can’t quite catch. Perhaps every time we fall asleep (even the word fall communicates the instinctive way we tumble into dreams), we are playing with the boundaries of consciousness and unconscious, of darkness and light, of death and life.