Sleep, Pain & Making Weakness Naked: Drafting an Explication on the State of My Unreadiness

I hate sleep more than you. This presumes you hate sleep, at least  some of the time. A faulty premise no doubt, but this is the place I start from -- that sleep is a thing to be feared, a realm of torture and disgrace, a hated necessary requirement of human beingness.

My imagination on the matter is bound to a perspective wrought through the discomfort of physical  circumstance, and thus, can only suppose that there are no other options but for one to hate sleep. So, hopefully, I hate sleep more than you. This  is a fact for people with chronic pain. At least it is my fact about  my pain and my sleep. Every thread count is frightening and serious. Every mattress a bed of nails. Every pillow smothers and fixes bones, sinew and muscle  together.

This body is mean for resting. Hungers begging against the weighty push of atmosphere. Wreaks toward dawn through the quicksand of prone  positioning. Is eager, yet ever disappointed, to report on "a good night's sleep" that never happens.

I was born with several discs in my neck fused together. Gravity and surgery and injections and therapies have all done the rest. Lots of consequences on the nervous system in situations like mine. Dramatic impacts on lymph, endocrine and hormonal systems too.  But the biggest consequence is pain. A pain in the neck. Sometimes it feels as though I have become a pain in the necks of those around me – "the pain in the neck" worn like a badge across my ridged brow.

There, right there if you imagine carefully, there is tiredness perched on my shoulders. Tired coiled round to tight my craning  spine;  tired's fist  pounding, shank thrusting into cord and disc grind;  tired slamming thorn stalks up from the ground into the soles of my feet:  tired always already lapping the seam of day's shore and night's sea.

Here is sleep, hack merchant of pain, distilling woe and cloning expectations of release, or relief,  or retreat. Sleep's promise nightly torn asunder by the circumstance of my body merely being. Sleep pillaging the lubrications of motion with stasis to concretize limbs that sing for ease uneasily. Sleep, here enemy-disguised as respite, as peaceful rejuvenating bounty of quiet:  bone wrencher  savaging for a pounce.

Where I sleep is material. "Where" explores the junction of pragmatic question regarding availability and the aesthetic concerns of style -- this bed wonders pain to babbling incoherence upon awakening; that bed is convenient for  folding, for seeming a secret; once- upon-a-time beds are magical for cushion, delicious for comforting. My neck nightly beds with apprehension. Neck kneading the body complex rigid and sopping in a seizured terror of gravity greeting surface with  hammering persistence.

When sleep sweeps sweet dreaming into orderly chaos our archetypes resemble  each other. Before movies, what were dreams "like"? When dreams seep  in to marvel all the details of everydayness; when sleep cement swells  loose into the liquidity of dream time; when tired finally finds the  vacuum of dreamness:  this, this when, is when I feel pain free. This is a  consolation, this dream time absent of pain a small booby-prize in  the feardom of my sleeping.

Otherwise, on awakening or awake ... well, it is what it is. To elaborate on this pain and sleep system feels self-indulgent and  embarrassing. To articulate a model of "my" sleep, "my" pain, "my"  fear risks veering into self-pity at every turn. Every body's pain is  relative, related through being wholly unwanted. Where else but  through addressing our pain do we act out a pedagogy of acceptance. How else but through baring witness to our fears do we act to contain them.