Sleep, That Wretched Nurse

I don’t suppose I can reliably claim that I have just seen, at four a.m. in the third day of March in the Midwest, the first firefly of the summer. That won’t, however, stop me from staking my claim. I see what I see, and the world can believe whatever the hell it wants.

I fell asleep briefly an hour ago, in my chair, and woke with a start (as I often do) when a phrase bloomed in my brain, almost like the way that ghostly little box pops up in the corner of your computer screen to indicate you have a new email message. On this occasion the phrase was this: But I am not a fleet of tankers.

From there the words will generally start drifting across my skull in random, almost spectral strands, like mist moving along a creek in the middle of the night. I had a brief image of an Amish farmer, standing at the window of his house in a dark valley, watching fireworks blow open the sky beyond the bluffs, at which point I noticed the firefly in the backyard.

Time seems stranger to me all the time. It seems to seize up in me. I have these odd experiences, generally during the daylight hours when I so seldom can tell whether I am asleep or awake. I used to think that during these episodes I was slipping into some sort of trance-state, or having an out-of-body experience. Now, though, I just accept them as real.

I’ll notice, for instance, that the clock hands are frozen, the second hand hanging in one place along the clock face. I’ll look out the window and see the old man next door paralyzed over a rake, or stranded halfway up a ladder, one foot suspended in space.

I’m not talking about blackouts or mere repetition or some combination of aphasia and amnesia. No, I seem to literally and consciously fall out of time, out of step with the rotation of the planet, if in fact the planet rotates (my ignorance is vast). I get yanked clean out of time for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch. I can move through the silent house, pause at the refrigerator to pour myself a glass of orange juice, and drink the orange juice while staring out the back window above the kitchen sink.

If the clock stops at, say, five minutes to ten and remains seized up for ten minutes, within an instant of the resumption of its normal function the clock, and time in general, will have corrected itself. The clock hands will immediately read five minutes after ten, the old man will be bagging the leaves in his yard, and there will be no dirty orange juice glass in the sink.

There have been occasions where during these otherwise frozen moments I have fetched the newspaper from the porch, sat down on the living room floor and read the paper from front to back, only to discover fifteen minutes later that the hands of the clock have resumed their normal operation and the paper is back on the welcome mat outside the front door. At which point, of course, I go through the whole routine all over again, and from time to time notice small (yet nonetheless disturbing) changes in what I read moments earlier.

I hesitate, sometimes, to make these admissions, but I figure at this point there’s no sense in holding anything back.