To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

Ah, but there’s no rub! For I don’t usually dream, and when I do, they’re interesting. Besides, it doesn’t matter to me whether I dream or not, because my sleep is so wonderful.

Even though I am quite the nightowl and procrastinate going to sleep, once I am cuddled in bed with Jagman, I love it. I realized many years ago that sleeping with the one you love can be the simplest embodiment of purity and love. A glimpse of heaven. Nirvana.

Every night, without fail, when I finally crawl under the covers, no matter how late it is or how sound asleep I think he is, Jagman moves his left arm for me to put my head on his shoulder. At some point in the night, one of us will roll over and then we sleep with our bodies molded together in a fetus position. (Is that how twins lie in the womb?) I don’t know how many times we roll over, because I sleep soundly until the alarm goes off. But when it does, we are usually still tangled up together. It’s set for three snoozes, so I can wake up slowly and savor the last few moments wrapped up in his arms.

I remember thinking about that       while I was reading Joan Dideon’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She didn’t write about not being able to sleep by herself. When I was writing my Nano-novel about a widow, I remember being preoccupied about the whole sleep thing. Ever since then, I consciously appreciate those moments together, every night and every morning.

Unless we are fortunate enough to die together in a car accident (when we’re 80), one of us is going to have to sleep without the other. I think about that sometimes. Sometimes I panic about it, because I don’t want to be the one sleeping by myself. One night while I was falling asleep, with my head on his chest, listening to his heart, I said, “Promise me that if you die before I do, you’ll come back and sleep with me, haunt my dreams and not leave me.” But he was already asleep, his breathing slow and heavy. And then I realized it didn’t matter if he’d heard me or not. He’ll come back to me each night, because nothing in the afterlife can be better than the bliss of sleeping with the one you love.