“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.” - William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Nature often seems so cruel. I am eternally grateful to human innovation for rescuing us from the clutches of hurricanes, predators, and microbes. Nature is a bloody, hideous thing. But there is one domain where nature seems unusually loving, and that is sleep.
Sleep is mysterious in its benevolence. It is nature's morphine without the addiction. Countless times in life, I have been doubled over in the psychic pain that afflicts all of us: a boyfriend breaks up with me; a family member dies; a potentially traumatic event shatters my world.
Each time, sleep came as a gentle healer. Like kindly ghosts, dreams pilfered my mind, swept away the anguish, and tidied up the rubble. Eventually, with sleep’s ministrations, the sting was removed. As Shakespeare observed, sleep is sore labor's bath and the balm of hurt minds.
After my grandmother died, I would see her in my dreams. I would be back in her house, and it was alive again with her presence, her music, her cooking. I would feel her love for me — love that was absolute and unfailing. Alternatively, I would realize in dreams that she was gone, and access a flood of grief and loss that defied description. Upon waking, I knew that my mind had done some deep surgery beneath the surface so that, when I thought of my grandmother, I would only know her love and less the grief of her death.
After I survived a shooting in my late teens, I was plagued with unspeakable dreams. In these nightmares, the dead walked, the night flickered with the blue lights of law enforcement, and monsters with guns stalked. And yet, as fearsome as these dreams were, they were instruments of healing. They sucked the poison from the memory of violence. I can now look back on the shooting without apprehension or trauma, but only with compassion for the 19-year-old kid who was savagely forced to witness violence he was not ready to see.
What strange mercy is this? Nature hasn't left us alone and without consolation in this cold universe. Evolution has given us tools to be resilient, no matter how ferocious the pain.
I find comfort in this fact because the pain in my life has been savage recently. After some cataclysmic personal events, I’ve experienced some of the most astonishing and acute pain I’ve known in many years. It’s the kind of pain that crushes you into the fetal position, makes you dry heave over the toilet in the bathroom at work, and makes you fantasize about being gone forever. This anguish has opened Pandora’s box, and a horde of other dysfunctions have invaded - OCD, anxiety, depression. But I hold on to the memory of resilience.
My consolation is this: my brain will heal itself. In the same way the body knits flesh and bone, it knits gashes in the mind as well. As hard as it is to see any way out of this pain, I know this much: it will someday be forgotten. I will forget this agony, as I have forgotten all previous agonies. Dreams and sleep will do their merciful work, decomposing the pain until it is nothing more than soil.
Thank you for sharing. I hope you find relief soon!
Great read. Sleep is healing but I've been finding that as I get older I simply don't value it as much but I do love analyzing my own dreams. My dreams are never saucy either. Nobody ever gets nude in my dreams. I'm even a boring dreamer. Lol