I’m lying down but I can’t sleep.

By Luca Zani

It’s one thirty-eight in the morning. In your sleep, you shift your knee to a position that looks like the night terrors of a chiropractor. You’re blocking the tv, but I was only listening to the audio anyway. I refuse to believe this is comfortable for you. In your sleep, you smile contentedly. You look happy. 

You mutter a string of incomprehensible sounds and appear to be arguing, passive aggressively, with someone in your dreams. I couldn’t possibly know who this is. You seem aggravated, and I wonder if you are winning the argument. I wonder what they said to frustrate you. You fell asleep about an hour ago. 

You sleep silently, easily, like every night. I wouldn’t notice, were it not for the way your breathing evens out, and the slight bend in your back. Now, It’s two-forty am and still I can’t sleep. I’m lying, silent, but it just won’t go. Some nights are like this, even now. 

For years of my life I slept no more than three hours a night. You swing your head from one side to the other and inhale, deeply, as if you have something important to say. You don’t wake up. You move yourself, bringing an arm to itch your ear, aggressively, but still you don’t wake up. 

I don’t know how you’re able to sleep with such ease, such intentionality. As though it were as simple as commanding the body to go, and waking up eight hours later, rested. My body doesn’t work in this way. My body doesn’t function like this. 

Facing me, your nose twitches like it’s picking up a bad smell. I try not to take this personally. I watch your sleeping face - I’m grateful that you trust me this much, to be so totally vulnerable, so defenceless, in front of another person and to feel safe enough, still, to fall asleep. 

I see what the doctor means by rapid eye movement - I wonder what concatenation of mirror images and kaleidoscopic ambiguities you’re seeing in your dreams, projected onto the screens behind your eyelids. Does it feel like it’s really happening? I wonder if you’ll remember them in the morning. I wonder if you’ll be sad when you wake up.  

Your leg comes to rest on top of my knee. I know that if I move, uncomfortable as it is for me, you’ll wake up. I don’t want to interrupt your argument, not before you get to deliver the next witty comeback, or the final, crushing riposte. You look perfectly hostile. Now it’s later, it’s three-sixteen and still I cannot sleep. 

In the morning, you won’t know any of what I saw on this night. You won’t know how you looked, arguing with the dream-man that I’ve never met. You won’t know how close I came to pulling you out of that vicious confrontation, with a twitch of the knee. Maybe, you won’t remember any of your dream, either. Almost half your time on this planet passes in this evanescent state, and you probably don’t remember the last five nights any better than you do the last five hundred. Doesn’t that scare you?

You wake up with a start and ask for some water. I give it to you without comment, without asking about the argument. I hope that you are winning, and that you remember this victory when you wake up. I wonder if I appear in your dreams at all. I wonder what role I would play. 

Luca Zani is a philosophy student at the University of Warwick. He has a keen interest in cultural politics, semiotics and language, and dabbles in creative writing and poetry.