Summer Most Heat Moon
Yesterday I did an experiment in sleep deprivation. Not intentionally, of course. As I gained back an hour to an hour and a half at a time over the day-necessary because of the sleep lost that night-my mind began to lose track of the sleeping/waking distinction. I would wake up, still clinging to the dream state and still tired enough to be only partially awake. Then, tiredness would take over and push me back to bed, the waking state only partially realized while I was up.
Sundowning. In a strange place like a hospital, how the elderly could enter a state like the one I experienced yesterday, the disoriented state called sundowning, became obvious to me, sleep disrupted and coming in uneven increments over a 24 hour period. Once untethered from the usual clear demarcation between awake and asleep it could be very difficult to find your way back to it.
It was not unpleasant, at least for me, but if the outside world, the world outside my dreamy/semi-awake state, had demanded normal attention, I could easily have become agitated, unable to understand the expectations. Then, others would have become concerned about me. They would have wanted to “help” me return to the usual way of experiencing day and night. The harder they pressed, the more difficult it would become. At least I can see how that might happen.
Remembering my father-in-law Merton as he neared death, he seemed to float in an idiosyncratic demi-monde most of the time. Near the end he reported angels descending, coming for him. This may well have been his reality, rather than a dreamy experience. Once in this place epistemology becomes untethered too and our ways of knowing enter a different metaphysical realm. In other words our reality becomes different from that of the consensus, though we don’t know that. At that moment we have passed through a portal, not to the Otherworld, but to an Otherworld.
It could be that death comes to us, probably does come to many of us, in a demi-monde of our own. It might come, in that case, in the cliched form of a beloved parent or other relative. Or, angels. Or, depending on your inner compass, a demon from the depths of your own hell. Me, I’m hoping for a slow stroll into Arcadian fields where, bounding toward me, are all the dogs I’ve ever loved.
