Thursday, October 11, 2007

11th October
The sleep centre was a small windowless room, soundproofed, right in the heart of the hospital building.
To get to it, you had to ask permission to go past two locked doors.
it felt like a secret, defended kind of place: and a little frightening.
The sleep machine is a mask that fits tightly over the nose connected to a long bendy tube plugged into an air blowing machine.
It was hard to sleep that night. I couldn't get comfortable, my mind kept racing, my legs kept jumping. I would develop mysterious itches. It was as if i was resisting sleep with all my strength.
But i did, eventually, in that mysterious way you do, and then I woke up after what felt like a very short time. As if it was straight afterwards.
I felt irritated with myself for waking up; and leaving what i dimly remembered as a very pleasant, deep peaceful kind of place.
Up to now, i have tended to sleep for what feels like a very long time at first; and then wake up to find it has hardly been any time at all, and it is still 1 am.
This time I felt I'd only just got off; but I found out it was in fact 4am.
So I had slept longer: and I think deeper.
For the next morning, at breakfast, my hitherto unseen companions in that place said they had been woken by screaming.
And last night, though it still felt strange, it felt less strange: rather like the plates I used to have to wear in my mouth as a boy, following the visits to the orthodontist: that always felt like enormous lumps of metal at first but which after a bit my brain would somehow stop registering.
Perhaps it will be like that.
And I wonder what will happen to my dreams....

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