Elizabeth Taylor
6 march
The most important skill I learned as a medic in the military was the ability to lay down almost anywhere under nearly any circumstance and fall asleep. A couple hours of sleep huddled under a poncho in the rain, twenty minutes of peace curled up on a gurney in the morgue, a brief respite stretched out on an old woolen blanket in the back of a field ambulance. Until you’ve been seriously sleep-deprived, you’ve no idea how precious it can be.
What’s best is that hypnagogic point when the waking world and sleep meld together, when you can’t tell thought from dream, and you don’t feel any need to distinguish between the two. Second best is that complete cessation of wakefulness, sleep deep and dreamless, a drawing of the curtain over—well, over everything. An indifferent unfilled void, an absence, a welcome nothingness.
I feel an instant kinship when I see somebody asleep in a situation where others are awake. At a desk. On a park bench. On the train. I’m familiar with the terrain of sleep, and wherever that slumbering person is, I suspect I’ve been there too. What differs is what we bring back with us. You can’t return the souvenirs of sleep.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
