A Humble Letter To Sleep
Come on, sleep. Let’s see you break in through my left eardrum and invade my brain with your heavily armed sandmen and your fluffy pillows of doom. I know you can knock me out cold, I’m pretty much just sitting here defenseless.
In fact, it’s less than defenseless, I’m practically yours already. I’m sitting here sleepily, thinking that it’s really time for me to go to sleep, but I don’t feel like I should. How do I know if you’ll accept me into your realm? Maybe you’ll douse me with chicken fat the very second that I fall asleep? And what then, will I have to wake up covered in chicken fat? Won’t that mess up my blanket? Why can’t I just sleep through the night without getting doused in animal byproducts by you and your minions?
I know, I know. This is the way sleep has been handled for thousands of years, and even if you wanted to change it you don’t have the authority to rebel against all of those historically entrenched customs. Your ancestors would have to take a break from lounging around heaven playing the harp just to stab you with lightning bolts and take away all your butter.
I get it, that’s not the kind of life you want to be living, stabbed hundreds of times with bolts and without any butter. I wouldn’t like that either. But someone has to be the first one to stand up to years of injustice. I can’t live for thousands of years more with the constant fear of chicken fat every time I’m on the verge of falling asleep.
And yet sometimes you just don’t stage that military offensive that claims my brain for your own and lets me drift off to slumber without any legal or moral complications due to not being properly invited into your domain. And then what am I to do? Stay awake for weeks at a time until you realize that you’ve forgotten about me? Or take my chances with an unauthorized voyage into your land?
It’s the kind of conundrum that really keeps me up at night, and I hope that someone up there is taking notes and considering better alternatives for the future. We can’t keep doing this forever, right? At some point someone has to declare the game a tie and we can all move on to a rousing game of Duck Duck Goose. I think I found a spare rulebook at the pawnshop earlier in the month, so it’s certainly an option.
All I’m asking is that you keep it in your mind, especially as you’re coating me in bacon grease. Thank you.