Night work

Falling asleep feels like it is time to go to work. Not in a sense of the daily grind that one has to do to make a living, but for my mind to take its time to unleash itself and begin the process of growth and creativity.

There are nights when I have trouble getting to sleep. My mind is filled with all of the things that I didn’t  get to do that day, all of the due dates I have upcoming and things I haven’t finished. My mind tries to sort out the myriad projects I want to attempt or have been putting off doing. Those are the hard nights, for sleep does not come easily.

But when sleep does arrive, it is like checking into the imagination spa. You strip off all of the baggage and weights that you have been wearing and it is casual Friday.

My mind continues to roam, only this time it is not weighted down. So those things that I wanted to do, I do. I’m a writer, a song composer, I can fly (well float actually) and do things that might seem impossible.

There are times during mid-work sleep that I do wake up. Sometimes disappointed that my dream project I was working on was incomplete. Sometimes thankful that I was able to escape the confines of whatever it was I was involved in. Usually I go back to sleep after my sleep work-break and begin a new task. At times though, I do get up, as is the case if a new tune for song is in my head, and find a recorder to record the tune by humming it before returning to sleep, for I know from experience that that tune will be gone from my head when the sleep work day ends.

And the night continues on. When the day arrives and it’s time to finish my sleep work, some products of my work do usually survive for a retelling for a short period of time. Then they get filed away, sometimes to be rekindled at a future work sleep. More often, to be sealed up and not accessed again. And so it goes. Back to the daily grind of the waking work day; passing time until it is again the moment when I can say, “Falling asleep feels like…”