Sleeper

4-11-09

Here is the thing about sleeping: you can hear everything. This has been proven by science. You think that sleep is like a switch being turned to off, but it is nothing like that at all. The little electrical picture of your brain is still all lit up, and when someone says your name, or puts down a teacup near you, the lights flare up brighter. Except one little part, one little corner near the back of your brain, which is the corner which decides if you are awake or not. When it says you are, the other lights in your brain carefully move around you. They keep thinking. They keep deciding what is true and what isn’t. They keep choosing people to be in love with and different people to imagine sex with, and a dog you had once for six months before you realized that you weren’t that generous of a person, and one of the characters from your favorite television show who, no matter how much you pretend otherwise, you do not know how to tell apart from a real person in your life. Your brain has clever systems to decide what is a threat and what is not a threat and what may be a threat but is less important than being awake tomorrow.

You hear the traffic outside the window, if you live on a street with traffic. I live on the main street of my city and sometimes I forget to close my window but my mind is nice to me, nice enough to pretend that it doesn’t hear anything, sirens and old brakes and the way that just moving air aside is impossibly loud. Laughter in the living room that I do not know the cause of and would not know how to be a part of, my brain chooses not to let me know it is hearing. Your mind chooses to flip itself over and care more about what you imagine than what is real. It lets you care more about what you wish you remembered, instead of what you do.

A lover laying next to your can pour words into your ear while you sleep, and without knowing you are deciding, you decide, whether to pretend to be asleep, or to be asleep. If you pretend you can listen to the secret things they want to say to you, and they will say things they never say when you are awake because those things are too tender and to say them is to enter a permanent state of holding your breath. Or you will choose to stay asleep. You will still hear everything. You will simply stay silent to yourself, because your body needs to rest and your mind stands guard and when your lover whispers in your ear it lets you believe that this is not a threat.