It was a Christmas family gathering and I was complaining to the people who shared my end of the table about no longer being able to sleep through the night. “When I wake at 3 am and can’t go back to sleep, that is the worst,” I said.
My Uncle Phil, my senior by about 30 years, said, “When that I happens to me, I just lie still.”
“You do?” I asked. “How does that work?”
“I just pretend that I am dead,” he said with a chuckle. This answer left me speechless. The idea of pretending to be dead in a way that was successful in allowing myself to enter into the release of sleep confounded me utterly.
“Wow,” I replied. “I’ll have to try that.” I knew that I would never try that. But on that night, I turned my mind to other things and didn’t consider why.
Now I think cannot pretend to be dead to go back to sleep is because I fear death more than I fear wakefulness. I hover over the release that would let me sleep in fear that death, in demonic form of some sort, will take me if I open my grip, like someone clinging to the side of a tall building.
Fear of death will be the subject, perhaps, of another blog entry. For now, though, I want to think about what it means to be still. Is stillness like death? Is it what happens when one lets go of a grasping, terror-filled holding? Could I not live, safely, above the waters of drowning, floating on top of it like a raft? Serene, not clinging, but balanced, poised, in a homeostatic equilibrium?
Here, as always (for this is part of what it means to be a former dancer), my mind turns to holding a pose in ballet. There is not just one way to do this. There is letting go of your partner’s hand and holding a balance, in arabesque say, as a sort of virtuosic feat that will end either at the end of the musical phrase or when you signal the conductor that you are done. And there is a stillness of holding a pose as a corps de ballet member, as you frame a soloist while they are performing. And there is the stillness of a B-plus position as you wait in the wings before an explosive entrance.
All of these are suspensions of motion rather than the stillness of deep sleep or death. They are pauses; a rest in a musical line not the end of the music. In this way the pauses are pregnant, as the saying goes. They will give birth to something dynamic, alive, moving, flowing.
If I am comfortable with this sort of stillness, the stillness of suspension of life, then the way to give myself back over to sleep in the middle of the night follows. Instead of “pretending I am dead” I could see sleep as a kind of dance – a kind of alternate stage of being with a beginning, middle, and end. Considered this way, my night waking is a suspension of the dance of my sleep, with its highs, lows, rapid eye-movement, dreaming and non-dreaming phases. Entering back into sleep enters once more into part of life, then – a beautiful, continuing, productive part of life. It is not the stillness of inertia. It is not the stillness of ceasing to be.
If this is true then the technique to sleep again is to re-enter a sleep state somehow rather than cease to live. Perhaps this is what my uncle means by pretending to be dead. For him it’s the pretense that allows a sleep state to occur. My technique, instead, involves a loosening of my fear-based hold on wakefulness as life. To remember that a flow back into the sleep-world is simply a movement into a continuing dance that is not the end of life but part of it.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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