Of counting sheep and buying sleep
The setting is an ancient but popular mattress shop in Old Delhi. A tall, stout man who seemed to have taken over his ancestors’ customised mattress making business, stood behind the counter, in the antique looking shop that smelt of bales of raw cotton and fritters being fried in the stall outside. His freckled face went well with the red polka dotted shirt he was wearing, he cajoled my friend, Garima and me, with his ware, “Madam, our ancestors have sold mattresses even to the Mughals, since the times of emperor Jehangir. These mattresses will give you same ‘feel’ as Aladdin’s carpet!”
How so, I wondered. He persisted, “Dreams ma’am, dreams. You will have ‘fairy-tale’ dreams. Good sleep means good immunity also, no ma’am? Covid time …” What a salesman! I observe that he just used the buzzword‘immunity’. Garima and I order the mattresses. Would we too fly away to magic lands afar, as we lay down, like the princesses and empresses did? Were they insomniacs too, with all the political intrigues wafting around them?
Garima suffers from insomnia, hence as gifts for her birthday she’s been buying things that would lull her into deep and sweet slumber. Her intimate acquaintance with sleeplessness is harrowing. She solves Wordle, Quordle and the likes during the witching hours. Watches a movie or web series on one of the OTT platforms and tries not to look at the clock. Her condition and that of many others, remind me of William Shakespeare’s writings about sleep, especially the hopeless lament from Henry IV, “O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened you, that you no more will weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness?”
Insomniacs’ Hub
Garima is a part of a Whatsapp group called the Insomniacs’ Hub. Bizarre sleep-inducing devices have found their way here. Many brands of gadgets and sleep solution, wellness centres are marketing sleep to healthconscious consumers. Well, it’s ironic how e-devices have led most of us to this stage of sleeplessness and now we go back to another set of devices to heal us from the agony of ghost-walking through the day.
My son thinks that sleeping is a waste of time. Every second is used up to study, read non-fiction or scouring the stock market. When asked to rest, the cheeky retort is always Benjamin Franklin’s, “There will be plenty of time to sleep once you are dead.”
I quip back, “But without sleep your brain will die out like an uncharged battery.”
Dragana Rogulja, associate professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, with her team found that when animals and insects are sleep deprived, they just collapse and soon die. Human beings too could face a similar repercussion. Many literary insomniacs like Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Robert Frost and Vladimir Nobokov, Marcel Proust, cultivated habits of nocturnal writing and perceived their wakefulness as a gift. As for me, my phone reminds me that it’s time to sleep at 9pm daily and automatically goes into the aeroplane mode for 8 hours. Nothing is more soporific than a warm shower and a book, as I doze off while reading Proust, on most nights, with my glasses on. I do say a little prayer of gratefulness, addressing Somnus, Hypnos and all the lords of sleep across cultures, for a night of restful sleep — “the death of each day’s life”, “balm of hurt minds”, “sore labour’s bath”, “chief nourisher in life’s feast”, so accurately described by William Shakespeare.