Musings on Sleep ft. Lord Peter Wimsey & Eriks Esenvalds

This past summer, the week that I finished my internship, I was sitting upstairs in the crew room at the open window that overlooks the goat pasture and neighbor's hay fields, and I was reminded for some reason of "Only in Sleep" by Eriks Esenvalds, based on the poem by Sarah Teasdale. It's one that Legolas's and my choir director played for us during the Year Of Choral Learning Online Which Shall Not Be Spoken Of, and in fact, being introduced to new choirs, choral composers, and pieces was one of the only good things about the YOCLOWSNBSO. 

Anyway. So, I pulled up my favorite version of "Only in Sleep" and listened to it.

(I have embedded it so that you may do the same before we continue, if you would kindly.) (My other favorite version is this one, which was filmed in rehearsal.)

And suddenly, as the gorgeous harmonies bloomed from my not-quite-ideal smartphone speakers, I found tears oozing from my eyes, as I was filled with a feeling of incredible nostalgia, hiraeth, or, to co-opt one of Andrew Peterson's words, holore. It might've been just that it was my last week on the farm, and I was tired, but something about it moved me deeply. And perhaps fatigue was the reason why I started crying, but there's something about this song that always moves me. And I started to think more about what it might be.

That same week, I had just finished rereading Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, my likely second-favorite of the LPW mysteries (first favorite perhaps being Busman's Honeymoon, just because...SO CUTE. And HOUSMAN), and as I was curiously wiping moisture from my face (the phenomenon of eye leakage during music being a rare one), I found myself thinking of the scene where [minor spoilers ahead, just a warning] Lord Peter falls asleep while they're on the river, and Harriet is contemplating him in his "neat and noiseless kind of sleep...half-hedgehog", and thinks to herself (or perhaps the author thinks...it's unclear):

"Another person's sleep is the acid test of our own sentiments. Unless we are savages, we react kindly to death, whether of friend or enemy. It does not exasperate us; it does not tempt us to throw things at it; we do not find it funny. Death is the ultimate weakness, and we dare not insult it. But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty, and indulge in derisive comment upon his appearance, his manners and (if the occasion is a public one) the absurdity of the position in which he has placed his companion, if he has one."

And while I'm not sure if I have ever felt the "conscious superiority" she talks about, I certainly have felt the "protective instincts", which sleep sometimes appeals to. I was riding a bus to a Catholic conference with a friend (who's older than me!) when I was in high school, and she fell asleep, and a boy I slightly knew in the seat ahead of us turned around and said "ooh, we should draw a moustache on her while she's asleep!", and the sheer amount of protective rage that boy became the target of...well. It was something I didn't realize that I had a capacity for, and I still think of it from time to time. (I wonder if women are more prone to protective instincts towards sleeping or vulnerable people than men, just because we're designed to protect children? Babies are a prime example of something which in sleep arouses a protective instinct even among people not their parents... But that's, mayhap, a post for another day.)

Disclaiming conscious superiority aside, there is an element of vulnerability, innocence, and, perhaps, elementalness in seeing someone else sleeping. During that same last week of work, I came across one of my coworkers, a Scandinavian-descended man, large in both muscle mass and girth, who had a long beard that would do a dwarf proud, sacked out on the couch. And for a split second, what I saw wasn't my coworker, but something older, almost ancient--or maybe, as Chesterton would say, something younger, something from the youth of the world--Bacchus, Dionysus, or maybe Aegir. Not to say that my coworker was all of those entities, obviously, but something of his ancestry, history--or maybe just my own imagination--shone through in his sleep. 

Thinking about this--sleep being a way of seeing someone's innocence and essence, as well as the sudden glimpse of the youth of the world in my coworker's nap, and "Only in Sleep", suddenly (actually, only as I was writing this post!) something clicked. Sleep and childhood. Sleep as a way to re-experience childhood. Sleep as a way of re-entering childhood. Seeing someone sleeping as seeing them as a more childlike version of themselves. 

Only in sleep I see their faces

Children I played with when I was a child

...

Only in sleep Time is forgotten--

What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago

...

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces

...

And for them am I too a child?

Perhaps it's because I am at a turning point in my life: even in my last year as a teenager, having been an adult technically for over a year, I still feel like I am, in many ways, still a child, though in many other ways, I've moved beyond that world. Maybe that's the reason, in addition to the awe-inspiring harmonies, why this song inspired such deep hiraeth.

Mayhap, in addition to being a gateway to childhood, sleep reminds us of The Long Sleep, in which Time is forgotten...Death, which hopefully will bring us to union with God. 

Maybe another reason why I'd been thinking about sleep so much was that I'd been having extraordinarily vivid dreams. I dreamt that my high school best friend was getting married to someone she'd only met via Skype--but her dress was beautiful. I dreamt that I got to meet Tolkien. I dreamt that an incompetent friend of mine left my backpack with everything I needed in it on a bus. I dreamt that my mom was having another baby. 

Dreams are weird. I have always thought this. They're ephemeral--sometimes, but sometimes they stick with you for a long time, like the dreams I'd have as a kid that there was a bear in our yard. We know they're not real, yet while we're in them, they feel real. They make sense while they're happening, and then we wake up and think "what on earth?". They're the frontier between our unconscious and our conscious, often recognizing our wishes and fears better than we can awake. 

Have you ever wondered why on earth we dream? Why the world is such that we go on adventures (whether good, bad, or quotidian) in our slumbers? As Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, "You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit." In other words, the world could quite easily have been made quite different--and we must be full of wonder at how it has been made. Even though scientists have theories, they really don't know for sure why we dream. We didn't have to--we would have been complete humans without dreams. And yet, we do.

So, another way in which sleep brings us back to childhood is through the wonder of dreams--and even the wonder of sleep itself. Wonder characterizes childhood, and while it doesn't have to be lost with the loss of childhood (as Chesterton would be quick to assure us, and is an excellent example of himself), as we get older, many things that seemed so marvelous acquire explanations that seem to make them less wonderful. 

Clouds are made of water vapor. Plants grow through photosynthesis. Airplanes and birds can fly because of complicated physics equations that exist, though they fly right out of our heads as soon as they've been put in. The wind is a result of fronts and various weather patterns which also are hard to grasp except for a meteorologist. 

But sleep and dreams--those are harder to explain. We lose our consciousness and rationality that is the gift of God, as Aquinas would tell us--but only temporarily. Our unconscious mind (whatever that is, and if it exists) tells us marvelous stories which seem real. And no scientist can entirely explain this--especially since they've decided that human rationality is decidedly out of their purview. 

So perhaps part of the way sleep is related to childhood, in addition to an observer being able to see childhood and the elemental-ness in the sleeper as the lines of years are relaxed and smoothed, is that there is an element of the unexplained to it that can still inspire wonder and point to mystery, even for an adult, for whom the world has (wrongly or rightly) lost other parts of its mystery. 

I feel like this post has kind of just been ramblings along a theme, but I hope that it makes some sort of sideways sense, and maybe sparks some ideas in your own head! :)

Have you ever thought about how weird dreams are? Do you feel weirdly protective towards sleeping people? Are you acquainted by Eriks Esenvalds?