Insomnia

   Sleepless nights preceding hazy mornings.  The worst is when you know that a big day is ahead of you, and you really, really needed a good night's sleep  to avoid the situation where you say something stupid in a moment of haziness.  Or when it is exactly and frustratingly 3:17 am and you're trying not to dwell on the fact that you're thinking too hard about sleeping.  
   Sometimes, though, I feel that it's not so bad to lay awake during the  purplish hours from midnight to dawn.  When your heart is broken, when you feel that it is simply too insensitive to be productive the next day, sometimes it's nice to have all of the night to ponder and contemplate things.  It's an unexpected luxury, because your exhaustion lends a certain languid flavor to your thoughts.  It's so beautiful, because everything is colored a whimsical, dusky blue.  Suddenly your life as you look back becomes a thrilling storybook tale, worthy of song.  Suddenly things are not as they are; quintessence is no longer quintessence; you are not you; everything ceases to exist as it is.  All is at the mercy of your fancy.  
   My room-it's quite a nice room, with its numerous prints of Nattier and Robert Plant -melts into the mist and might reappear as the silken lining of Sultan Mehmed's tent. The sultan himself sits before a vast mahogany table, surrounded by his courtiers, generals, and advisors, all resplendant in splendid tunics and turbans.  My imagination might pause at that table; surely a piece as fine as that would be heavy?  It's such an impracticality to haul it over such a long distance as one of the Sultan's military campaigns.  And the a map sits atop the smoothly ruddy surface! Finely etched upon the finest calfskin, it must be the marvel  of whole nations.  

      A whirl, a spin, a waft of grass and horses and soldiers, and then the scene shifts at my mind's command.  The walls are papered with dainty apple blossom prints and the windows are hung with frilly muslin curtains.  It is evident by the costly furniture that this is a room of heirlooms and ancestors.  Festooned by candles and sprays of cherry blossoms is a yellowing picture of Robert E. Lee.  Ah, so this is the Old South, caught in the ravages of the American Civil War.  I had wondered at the bareness of the room, even with its fine threads.  I pause, mourning the loss of the old Southern ways, of fine ladies and powdered gloves.  Yet I feel, too, a sense of exultation at the emancipation of a people too long oppressed, whose stories were too long disregarded, and whose children were too long shuffled off to the side.  




At some point, my waking fancies will see me to the edge of the the River of Consciousness and accompany me, instead, as Dreams.  

   
 
“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
― David Benioff, City of Thieves