Tucking in the corners

I have two ways of sleep­ing, it seems — I say “it seems” because, oddly enough, I’m not usu­ally awake to observe myself sleep­ing, so I can only base these obser­va­tions on the state of my bed when I wake up in the morning.

My first way of sleep­ing is obvi­ously very calm, serene and still. The day dawns, and apart from a small indent­a­tion on my pil­lows where my head has res­ted overnight, the bed is almost immaculate.

My second way of sleep­ing is the com­plete oppos­ite. I drag myself out of my bed when I wake up and, turn­ing back to look at it, it has the appear­ance of some­thing that has been hit by a small hur­ricane. The duvet, if it’s even man­aged to stay on the bed, has formed itself into a twis­ted heap at the foot of the mat­tress; the pil­lows have scattered in all directions.

Of course, it would be nat­ural to assume that, in the second case, I have obvi­ously had very vivid night­mares dur­ing which I have slept uncom­fort­ably, throw­ing myself around and end­ing up rest­ing in very uncom­fort­able pos­i­tions. Not so. In gen­eral, I remem­ber noth­ing — either dreams or night­mares — from the nights when I have exper­i­enced agit­ated sleep. Instead, my most vivid recol­lec­tions occur when I awake in the pose of a statue atop a tomb, lying flat with my hands in a pray­ing pos­ture on my chest (well, almost), hav­ing barely dis­turbed even a corner of my sheet, pil­lows or duvet. Odd. Could it be that my night­mares are so power­ful that I’m frozen in ter­ror? Is it pos­sible that my dreams are so won­der­ful that I’m sent into a motion­less trance?

This morn­ing, my bed looked like a pack of wolves had torn it apart overnight (not to men­tion the fact that a small mon­key had appar­ently been styl­ing my hair into a fright-wig), and so it fol­lows that I remem­ber noth­ing of my dreams. I love sleep — it’s won­der­ful, and it con­tin­ues to present us with so many mys­ter­ies. It remains a cru­cial part of the human exper­i­ence that we still don’t entirely under­stand. That’s why I feel it’s import­ant for me to con­duct detailed research into sleep, often for hours on end. I’m doing this for the good of man­kind, so I hope you appre­ci­ate my efforts.