Illustrations Paula Dubois • Translation Annelize Visser
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When sweet sleep abandons you Lying awake at night, desperately counting sheep, you totally get why sleep deprivation is such an effective tool for torture, writes Karin Brynard. e all know it, don’t we? That dreadful feeling in the wee hours of the night when you slowly surface from a deep, restful sleep. It wasn’t a nightmare that woke you. Or things that go bump in the night. You just woke up. Just sommer. For a few sweet moments you’re still hovering in a state between sleep and wakefulness. Then a dog barks. Or a cricket takes out his rusty violin right outside your bedroom window. And now you know it’s over. The gods of sleep have once again abandoned you, wide awake at that old, deserted station called Insomnia. And the last train has left. You consider your options. Should you try counting sheep? Nah. It’s stupid. Self-hypnosis then, counting backwards from 10 and visualising each number. But it’s dreary work. Repeat a mantra? Meditate? These days, there are scores of apps with white noise or waves or endless muzak that will supposedly put you in a trance and send you off to dreamland. But I can’t sleep with noise, so I try listing lullabies with sheepy themes: Baa Baa Black Sheep, Mary had a Little Lamb. But my crazy mind drops a much darker tune into the mix: Sheep by Pink Floyd. It’s a protest song, raging against the mindlessness of society’s herd mentality and the hungry hounds of doom howling on the other side of the fence. The imagery takes on a sombre tone, the music fades. A gloomy shadow slithers into bed and nestles up against me. The night constricts into an airless cocoon and the silence closes in. The smallest sound grows deafening: a dripping tap; the alarm clock thundering the hours to the coming end. From somewhere outside I hear an owl – there is despair in its call. And loneliness. Three o’clock is the darkest hour of the night. The loneliest; perhaps the most fearful too. This is the hour when the tall, pale reaper carrying a scythe goes out to do his ghastly work. And you there in your bed? The darkness turns your gaze inward. Fitfully, you face down all your worries, you scrutinise old arguments, agonise about the things you could have done better. You worry abou
a child, the sad state of your finances, your unfinished will. If you’re not ready to die… To console myself, I think of all the great historical figures with whom I share this bitter plight: Napoleon, Van Gogh, Kafka, Newton and Marilyn Monroe. Newton had a mental breakdown and Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Lack of sleep drives people mad – with despair, manic fear, anxiety, exhaustion and depression. I try to steer clear of anxious thoughts. That’s why on sleepless nights I look towards the window to find the friendly countenance of the moon. And I’m reminded of the dazzle of the stars, a universe of tumbling light, a spectacle of wonder. My mother was a fellow sufferer, but what she did was pray. For the sparrows keeping vigil over fragile little sparrow eggs. For the nurses in children’s hospitals, that they be kind. For the pope, that he stays humble. For miners in the darkness underground or a hopeful student studying at night. The night, she believed, was actually a time of healing. It lets the forests breathe, sweeps pollution from the air, rakes together all the debris of the day, making space for new things to come. It’s a creative space, the night. It may bring the answer to a nagging question, or a brainwave for a brand-new venture. Looking at the moon, I’m reminded of the starlit nights of my childhood in the Karoo. On warm summer evenings, we carried mattresses out to sleep on the veranda. Lying on our backs, we traced the sparkling constellations in the sky and listened to the distant rumble of trucks on the road to Cape Town, dozing off to dream of the cool green-silted dams where we went swimming on the farm. Tuned into the benevolence of the night, I listen to a little nightjar’s hopeful song of salvation – good-lord-deliver-us. And with renewed hope, I surrender myself to the mercy of the night, at peace in the knowledge that the Good Lord will hear the little nightjar’s prayer. And if we’re lucky, also ours.
