The Sleep Desert

Sleep deprivation is an emptiness expanding. Your mind, which used to tick along with such nimble precision, opens like a void, like someone spooned all the gray matter out. Memory and thought pass through like wispy clouds on a hard blue sky. You try to grasp them, but they flutter away or dissolve like fog in your fingers. 

The problems of the day—what to eat for breakfast and when was the last time you showered and where your keys are—cycle through the deep space of your mind again and again but you can’t quite figure out the answer. Or you pedal between two choices (oatmeal with banana or apple?) before landing on a completely different one (pancakes!).

Your body, too, echoes vacuous, wobbling as if its structural center has floated away, as if wrestling with Jupiter’s hefty gravity. Or perhaps it’s just your hollow head that throws the rest of your bones out of balance. Energy evaporates and your vacated muscles leave you falling into pillows and chairs and floors. You try to fill the void with quick sugar like candy, but in seconds it evaporates.

*

I’ve never been a good sleeper. Even as a child, I would rise in the dark, pad my bare feet to the living room aglow with lamps and laugh tracks, and complain to my parents that I could not sleep. My father is an old hand at insomnia and would suggest a glass of milk warmed in the microwave. The refrigerator bulb would capture my shadow opening the door, gripping the plastic gallon jug, pouring half a glass of two percent. I would drink the milk alone in the starlit kitchen.

Perhaps due to my childhood insomnia, I became greedy for sleep, hoarding hours like Hershey bars. I hated elementary school sleepovers, how the powdered donuts in the sharp morning light only intensified the hangover of sleeplessness. When a flock of cousins would spend the night with my three siblings and me, I would hole up in my bed at what I deemed a reasonable hour (which was earlier than even what my parents imposed). Of course it’s impossible to expect flocks of cousins to be quiet, so I would groan at each squeal and giggle and mysterious thud that slipped through the feather pillows I’d stacked over my head. And eventually anger to the tip of explosion, wrathfully whipping the door open where they were corralled in joyous nighttime play. 

During university I successfully avoided having to “pull an all-nighter”; and when I taught in Ethiopia as a fresh graduate, I would be in bed most times by missionary midnight: nine p.m. Dubbed “grandma” by more owlish friends and family, I still leave parties early (dreading the New Year’s ritual of staying up till the ball drops) and slip into the bedcovers, insatiable for sleep.

*

Motherhood has only whetted this insatiability. As of my firstborn’s ninth month, I haven’t slept a full eight hours in over a year and have been chronically sleep-deprived since his birth. I crave hours of sleep, piecing bits together here and there between nighttime feedings, trying to cobble up a few sweet minutes during the day (unsuccessfully)—and it’s never quite enough. 

Recently I’ve found my prided grammar breaking down, my speech reduced to a kind of pidgin, all infinitives and missing articles. When my husband recently asked me how to warm a pizza, all I could muster was, “Broil. Low. Five minutes.” And yesterday for church, I dressed my son in pink socks and stained dragon sweatpants and a flannel plaid shirt that was too small. During book discussions it’s all I can do to let ideas wash through my sieve of a brain, hoping for something to hold by the end. Forget about remembering anything unrelated to daily survival (the names of neighbors, the plots of novels). Mental math is a virtual impossibility. My favorite words now: “I don’t know.”

My father often tells me he listens to what difficult circumstances have to teach. More by example than by words, he gently offers this suggestion, as he would a glass of warm milk. When I listen to sleep lack, I begin to wonder if, after all my years of slumber-greed, God is lovingly leading me into a sleep desert. Away from the somniferous trove where I’d amassed honeyed hours of delicious oblivion. A trove that, though it disappeared each morning, provided me with the intellectual vim and emotional balance to sort through the day’s problems, the physical stamina to juggle choppingscrubbingchasingrunning, the refreshment to begin each day with something like hope. Insomnia has long been one of my greatest fears. How to survive without sleep? And what is God whispering in these desert winds?

*

On our evening stroll, I explain to my husband how sleep-deprivation feels like fasting. You’re existing without a crucial, life-giving need being met. You’re hungry all the time, but for rest rather than food. You’re holding a gaping lack inside, a secret, invisible emptiness. And it pushes you, in the quandary of quotidian details, to look up: pray.

Sleep deprivation has long been tied to spiritual discipline. The desert mothers and fathers (third-to-seventh-century ascetics who sought God in Middleastern deserts) strove to eradicate any element of their lives that hindered pure communion with God. Including sleep. Sleeping arrangements—a reed mat, a pile of straw, a single sheet of sheepskin—were intentionally disruptive to slumber. Many slept only sitting up or on a reclining seat to remain alert. “One hour's sleep a night is enough for a monk if he is a fighter,” said Abba Arsenius. This same father (who deemed sleep a “wicked servant”) would pass whole nights awake. And Abba Bessarion testified, “For fourteen days and nights, I have stood upright in the midst of thorn-bushes, without sleeping.”

As one who sleeps on a thick mattress, padded in feather pillows, cool sheets, and a comforter, I find it difficult to submit to such severity. I hold on to passages of Scripture like the one attributed to Solomon (divinely given “a wise and discerning mind” like none other): “It is in vain that you rise up early / and go late to rest, / eating the bread of anxious toil; / for he gives to his beloved sleep.” And David writes of his slumber, “I lay down and slept; / I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.” Sleep is a gift from God, the fruit of humble trust in divine providence. 

Even Jesus, who entered finity in a body, needed sleep. He repeatedly withdrew from the crowd to rest (which, I would assume, sometimes meant catching a few winks). Once in a storm-tossed fishing boat, his shocked disciples found him sleeping. 

The very creation God designed follows the ritual of cyclical oblivion. On his first day of world-making, God separated the light from the darkness, leading humans naturally into slumber with each set sun. Whether nocturnal or otherwise, creatures rhythmically curl up in nests, caves, thickets, beds. 

Perhaps many desert mothers and fathers would agree that sleep is a divine lullaby sung into the rhythm of creation. Indeed, they had to sleep at some point. But sleep deprivation as a spiritual practice? How could chronic sleeplessness be thought so essential for inner transformation? 

Read the rest in The Windhover | Volume 26.2 (Print).