Beneath His Pillow

And so, like the landless gull, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick


There is sleep and then there is sleep.

We all know how strangely different one night of sleep can be from the next night. We all admire the innocent sleep of babies, dreaming of milk bubbles and hazy sweetness. Occasionally, once in a great while, we stumble across the threshold of our consciousness into such a simple boy’s sleep. But more often we’re shoved and pummeled in our helpless sleep by irrational, inexplicable combinations of reality and surreality. We’re mewed up against the morning with bizarre situations made of dreadfully familiar parts.

Some of us are hounded – and that is the best word for it, pursued relentlessly with wicked howling – by nightmares potently real and heart wrenching. They’re tailor-made by our rebellious subconscious to hit all the buttons of our fears, to grind against wounds that have never healed, to suspend us in a world of Hitchockian, quiet emotional horror. These aren’t simple nightmares like being carried away by vampires or squashed by steam rollers. Worse, these dark melodramas construct seemingly rational situations that play out sullenly toward an obvious, inevitable end that will expose every screeching nerve of your composure. You can see the grotesque end coming, rehearsing old defeats, debacles, catastrophes, shames. These are dreams of such anguish that you bang at the walls of sleep until you escape. Not only to wake, but to leave the bed, the bedroom, and stalk about the house looking for an article on railroad signals or an old cowboy film on Turner Classic Movies.

Night horrors are, like those vampires, night creatures. The best and sweetest sleep of grown folks is surely napping. A nap is gourmet sleep. It’s a step outside your normal schedule, a vacation from the rush of time. Importantly, it’s an indulgence. If you really shouldn’t take a nap, it will be sweeter.

Perhaps we’re less vulnerable fully clothed. We’re not cocooned in our night-time sheets but settled into the sofa, recumbent on the Eames chair, tucked out of the traffic pattern on the hard-carpeted floor of an airport. We choose to rest ourselves and play with time. We nap.

Now if we compare recipes for gourmet naps I must trot out my favorite sleep-snack: napping on a boat. No better place, and so many advantages.

You’ve sailed all morning and into the afternoon when some wise soul suggests “dropping the hook for a breather.” Perhaps you’ve been bucketed around by driving winds and frisky seas. Perhaps you’ve been at the helm wringing tiny advantages out of barely breathing wind. No matter: all that time your body has been flexing and straining every moment to balance you and your ridiculous vertebral column topped by that big, heavy, bobbly head. You can’t hear your muscles because they’re too busy to shout. But then the anchor plunges into the calm water of a lee under the land, making that deep ka-plump sound followed by the rattle of chain, then the buzz of anchor rode paying out. It catches, the boat’s prow is plucked up into the wind by its pull, it holds the bottom. Then there is an always-surprising quiet. Then your muscles complain, insist on relief: Get off our feet, sit down.

Caution is part of sailing. You take bearings: that dark oak just below that hilltop antenna; that house’s balcony just over that little patch of green lawn. The boat will swing back and forth like a balloon tied to a park bench. But if the bearings change, the anchor flukes are fouled and skipping fecklessly along the bottom. But these bearings are steady.

Below in the saloon you can lay out a nosh lunch: crackers, smoked trout, olives, sourdough bread, cheese, salami, sodas, a bit of wine. You talk politics and history while you chew and later while you clean up. Then the skipper announces his nap like a duke announcing his hunt. “Time for my Nap.” He disappears aft to the bunks under the cockpit.

You, first mate, have the bow, the big triangular space with plenty of light and a guarded amount of ventilation from the hatch.

The bow is livelier than the stern. You get a good rock up there but you must find a totally stable body state so your body isn’t tempted to continue balancing. Flat on your back is good. You’ll snore but who cares on a boat? You can feel the lift and fall, the back and forth, the liquid life beneath you, down with the walruses and whales (if they can deal with 15 feet of water).

I believe the secret to a good nap is not caring if you sleep. Lie down, shut your eyes, calm your limbs, feel your body. Listen to what’s going on around and drift. Maybe you’ll sleep. If not, you’re resting, yes? So you hear your shipmates in the cockpit laughing softly, discussing this and that. You hear the skipper, incapable of leaving his oar out, calling an opinion up to the cockpit. Their voices are sweet and distant, mixed with the sound of wind and the lap of waves against the hull, only an inch away. This afternoon the voices become your father’s voice and his brothers’ voices, talking about building . . . something, on the porch of the old camp on Big Wheeling Creek in Viola, West Virginia. You are now a boy of ten, lying on a purple horsehair fainting couch improbably carried to this rough cabin. You hear your grandma’s voice asking when dinner should be ready. You hear the sizzling scratch of a match, because they all smoked then, and maybe even the sulfur smell faint in the green herbals and wet mud and floor soap smells. Of course you’re asleep now. Asleep like a boy without responsibilities or disasters or odds against you. Casual, easy sleep.

Later you wake up to pounding directly overhead as the anchor is brought tight in, and the skipper calling you to the helm, the motor warming up, the afternoon light changed very little. You’ve been away how many minutes? Oh, years and years of them. A rest from time and duty. A nap.


Braxinoso Speaks

He's a tormented fellow at times. I've seen him wandering about the house in the middle of the night, avoiding sleep, ruining the best part of the next day with some haunted memory of the dream he had. An older man like Himself should be able to lay his fears down. But that may be his curse and his talent: he's not a senior; he's always ten years old.