AWAKE

There is a row of armchairs in the library, a line organized in sets of two: front to front, back to back, front to front, all the way down.  People come here to read, sometimes to study, but most frequently to nap.  It is out of the way and they won’t be disturbed much.  Even now I can lean my head out of my own chair and see heads propped against the wings of chairs with closed eyes and mouths ajar. 

Some students fall asleep accidentally in the midst of an assigned reading, but I’ve heard of people who come to the library to sleep on purpose, to snooze in relative peace and quiet.  Mark, back when he worked late nights here, once had to wake someone just before the building closed at one a.m.  The guy jumped up and muttered a shocked expletive when he realized how late it was.  There’s no telling whether he’d intended to sleep in the first place, or how long he’d been there.  Mark thought the guy might have been dozing in that chair for a good three hours.

I was deplorably awake at two in the morning a couple of nights ago.  Mark was quite soundly asleep beside me, and told me later that he wasn’t aware even when I turned the bedside lamp on, although at the time he rolled over and eyed me drowsily.  The problem was that my mind wouldn’t settle down.  My father, who has had more experience with this problem than I, devised a strategy years ago of systematically relaxing his body to cure insomnia.  He explained it to me, all the way up to the last step: to finish, you have to relax your mind.  This seemed as mysterious to me then as it does now.  How can you stop the workings of a head spinning with thoughts?  I turned on the light to pursue my own remedy, which involved a paperback book.

When I finally lose consciousness after an unsleepy night, I rarely remember having any dreams, as though the thoughts that would have fueled them were used up during prolonged wakefulness.  Last night I nodded off in no time, but my apparently busy mind concocted unusual escapades that left me disoriented for several minutes this morning.  Can it really be true that sleep comes to the uncluttered mind? – how then to explain the soup of real people and fictionalized events that trickled through my sleep?  I passed one of my professors on the stairs this morning and felt a strange shock of recognition – yes, I knew him from the several classes I’ve had with him, but he had figured prominently in some odd pseudo-classroom setting of my subconscious mind.  His friendly “good morning” sent me retracing my steps through half-remembered dreams.

Only a few minutes ago, a polite beeping from a phone caused stirring in a chair just behind me.  Some student has been woken by her own precautions against missing class, and she’s likely about to stumble off to prop her eyes open for an hour of lecture notes.  I am about ready to leave this spot myself, but there is someone farther down whom I noticed settling into his chair around the time the alarm went off.  He seemed quite alert at the time, but now he has abandoned the book in his lap and is leaning back comfortably.  I don’t doubt that he will be unconscious in a moment or two.