Book of the Dreamer
The first thing you should know is that sleep is not something you do. It’s something that has nothing to do with you in the normal sense. It’s something that does you. Like weather. Like monarchy. Like Catholic guilt or the algorithm: vast impersonal systems sliding over your small and silly head. Silly you! You don’t “go to sleep” any more than a village “goes to war.” Sleep arrives with drums and banners; it racks your limbs, plunders your calendars, steals your shoes, and leaves before dawn with your capacity for coherent speech. Its your everything and nothing. In the morning the villagers stagger out among the ashes. “We rested,” they say, and pick dead fire from out of their hair.
If you doubt this, try the usual rituals of our household gods. We have many. We kneel before the blue LED of the Oura ring. We burn offerings of magnesium glycinate. We chant our ASMR liturgy: hi friends welcome back to my channel today we’re going to brush the microphone like a Victorian cat. We are a nation in compression socks drinking tea concocted by the marketing department of a mattress start-up, reading “twelve proven tricks the military uses to fall asleep in 120 seconds,” then staying up for six more hours to see if anyone liked the post where we said we were going to bed. And in the black noon of 3:17 a.m. we learn the oldest secret in the world: sleep is a queen, and queens may not summoned.
Let us begin, therefore, with failure.
You lie down like a felled giraffe. You arrange your limbs in a symmetrical cruciform, in case God is watching and likes geometry. You flip the pillow to the cold side (the liturgy requires this). You count backwards: 99, 98, 97… you get to 93 and remember the thing you said in 2012 to a person who may no longer exist; the memory yawns open like a manhole; down you go, bonk, into the sewer of shame. Good. Excellent. You have failed properly. The acceptance of failure is the pillow. Failure is goose down. Failure has held you your whole life - on trains, in lectures, at the cinema, during that seminar on Kant’s schematism when your soul briefly evacuated your body and perched, owl-like, in the strip-lighting. Hold it close. Sleep now…
Never think of tomorrow. Tomorrow is sleep’s sworn enemy: the brick of continuity, the reappearance of your inbox like a rash, the ghostly parade of obligations who whisper, hey king did you see my last email. Sleep wants shards, not bricks. It wants the fragment, the half-formed, the dissolving. Think about tomorrow and you have become a customs officer at the border of your own skull. Sleep does not acknowledge your passport. Sleep is a smuggler, and you - tragic you - have declared your fruit. Sleep now…
Let memory melt. At first the day replays, a badly looping GIF of your open mouth at lunch. (You have never once closed your mouth at lunch, have you?) Let the edges smear. Permit the voice of your boss to molt into birdsong, then into an airplane, then into a single teaspoon left vibrating in an empty cup. Watch the table where you sat peel into a cliff and go obediently into the sea. This is not “losing focus.” This is the world composting itself. All good gardens rot. Sleep now…
Trust the nonsense. The threshold has doormen. A voice says: The parliament of spoons must now adjourn. The bloom of Mars sits sprightly on the nose. You see a hallway lined with aquariums in which hover the faces of people you’ve never met, which is to say almost everyone. These are not distractions. They are ushers with little flashlights, shuffling you to your seat in the dark cinema of yourself. Bow to them. Buy a small, wildly overpriced Pepsi. Sleep now…
Affirm the nothing. To sleep is to betray the perimeter. You are not guarding the gates; you are not “staying vigilant” for the prestige TV show that is your life. The city will do whatever cities do when nobody watches them: the statues will get off their plinths and put on each other’s hats, the stray dogs will attend poetry readings, the traffic lights will confess their sins to rain. From this abdication, somehow, morning arrives. This is the strongest argument against capitalism and for God that I know: that nothingness works. Sleep now…
Hold onto eternity. Do not clench; hold like a soap bubble. Every night you slip beneath the same black sea that swallowed your ancestors and will one day swallow you for good. The schools differ on what this means. The Theravādins claim the present is a razor blade: each instant flickers into existence and is then immediately annihilated. Aquinas, perched on a watchtower of cloud, insisted that God sees all of time at once, like a long parade of historical idiots on floats, pelting Him with confetti. Augustine, beautiful fool, proposeed that eternity is simply one infinitely extended today - the Monday that never moves along. Whatever your doctrine, you know this: when you sleep, you are still young; you will always be young; you will never be anywhere except the first soft second of being. Sleep now…
All of this is by way of saying: you cannot “fall asleep.” You can only fall. The sleep does you. Your job is to create the conditions under which your treacherous little self can slip its leash and vanishingly vanish.
I will now, in the spirit of public service and bad religion, offer the Shadow Archivist’s practical counsel:
—>Give your phone to a trusted enemy. If you surrender it to a loved one, they will be gentle. You need cruelty. The phone must be taken from you like a sword from a disgraced duke.
