Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.

I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal. That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.

Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you'll see the worldIf I'm not mistaken...Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.

His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.

I want to say more, but don't know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night-time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room.

For me, it's always a little sad getting out of bed. Every morning after I get up, I always gaze longingly at my bed and lament, 'You were wonderful last night. I didn't want it to end. I can't wait to see you again.

Other candidates may say they have 10 years of real-world experience, but I say, What, did they work nonstop with no sleep for a decade? If that’s the case, then I am an expert sleeper with a decade of surreal-world experience.

They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It's very lonely. I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am.

The speaker was so boring that he put me to sleep. But he didn’t stop talking, so I had to wake up and tell him to keep his voice down, or stop talking altogether, while I was trying to take a nap. Geez. Some people can be so rude.

We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence — yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.

Asta Sollilja slept on, her head in the corner, mouth open, chin up, and head back, with one hand under her ear and the other half-open on the coverlet as if she thought in her sleep that someone would come and lay happiness in her palm.

I had a dream about you. You were Mickey Mantle, and I was a fireplace without a mantle. I didn’t like baseball, so I kept telling you that you could do something productive with your life, like becoming a Tupperware salesman.


I had a dream about you. The sky looked threatening, and hail the size, shape, and color of boxing gloves started pounding us in the face. Luckily my mustache looked like Chuck Norris, and you were able to take shelter under my nose.


Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.