Sleep
Let us reach back, lovingly, and kiss that first little pang of pleasure. Let us re-invest in the past, momentarily or not, and envelope it with our arms so as to feel from it not the actual warmth but just the memory of being warm once. The pleasurable please of a welcome fit of slumber, body asks mind "May I rest?" and mind replies gladly: "Sure, I'll steer!" Physical given over to the non, the opposite, that other intangible being which is or is not a part of us. Sleep is a constant struggle and sometimes it is more exhausting than what the day heaps upon the body, tiring and achy and still no stop to it all. Time marches forward, and with it each day we need those hours to our self, our selves, what have you. I dip my toe in that cold pond and allow the little limb to acclimate to the iciness, in an hour I'll lower myself in to my knees but it just takes so long sometimes. Hugh Person, you person, he knew about it. I defer, humbly, to him:
"Ever since childhood and its nocturnal fears, sleep had been our Person's habitual problem. The problem was twofold. He was obliged, sometimes for hours, to woo the black automaton with an automatic repetition of some active image - that was one trouble. The other referred to the quasi-insane state into which sleep put him, once it did come. He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories of Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience.
In his adolescence he attempted to solve the first part of the problem by an ingenious method which worked better than pills (these if too mild induced too little sleep, and if strong enhanced the vividness of monstrous visions.) The method he hit upon was repeating in mind the metronomic precision of successive strokes of an outdoor game. The only game he had ever played in his youth and could still play at forty was tennis.
Let us reach back, lovingly, and kiss that first little pang of pleasure. Let us re-invest in the past, momentarily or not, and envelope it with our arms so as to feel from it not the actual warmth but just the memory of being warm once. The pleasurable please of a welcome fit of slumber, body asks mind "May I rest?" and mind replies gladly: "Sure, I'll steer!" Physical given over to the non, the opposite, that other intangible being which is or is not a part of us. Sleep is a constant struggle and sometimes it is more exhausting than what the day heaps upon the body, tiring and achy and still no stop to it all. Time marches forward, and with it each day we need those hours to our self, our selves, what have you. I dip my toe in that cold pond and allow the little limb to acclimate to the iciness, in an hour I'll lower myself in to my knees but it just takes so long sometimes. Hugh Person, you person, he knew about it. I defer, humbly, to him:
"Ever since childhood and its nocturnal fears, sleep had been our Person's habitual problem. The problem was twofold. He was obliged, sometimes for hours, to woo the black automaton with an automatic repetition of some active image - that was one trouble. The other referred to the quasi-insane state into which sleep put him, once it did come. He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories of Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience.
In his adolescence he attempted to solve the first part of the problem by an ingenious method which worked better than pills (these if too mild induced too little sleep, and if strong enhanced the vividness of monstrous visions.) The method he hit upon was repeating in mind the metronomic precision of successive strokes of an outdoor game. The only game he had ever played in his youth and could still play at forty was tennis.
... Why did he give up that specific remedy for insomnia when he married Armande? Surely not because she criticized his pet stroke as an insult and a bore? Was it the novelty of the shared bed, and the presence of another brain humming near his, that disturbed the privacy of the somnorific -- and rather sophomoric -- routine? Perhaps. Anyhow he gave up trying, persuaded himself that one or two entirely sleepless nights per week constituted for him a harmless norm, and on other nights contended himself with reviewing the events of the day (an automaton in its own right), the cares and miseres of routine life with now and then the peacock spot that prison psychiatrists called "having sex".
He had said that on top of the trouble of going to sleep, he experienced dream anguish?
Dream anguish was right! He might vie with the best lunatics in regard to the recurrence of certain nightmare themes. In some cases he could establish a first rough draft, with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing in minute detail, polishing the plot, introducing some new repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of the same, otherwise inexisting, story."
-V. Nabokov, Transparent Things, Chapter 16
He had said that on top of the trouble of going to sleep, he experienced dream anguish?
Dream anguish was right! He might vie with the best lunatics in regard to the recurrence of certain nightmare themes. In some cases he could establish a first rough draft, with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing in minute detail, polishing the plot, introducing some new repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of the same, otherwise inexisting, story."
-V. Nabokov, Transparent Things, Chapter 16
