Little Dreams, Little Earthquakes

Sleep and I have long been in an abusive relationship. We need counseling. We don't communicate, we linger in separate rooms until it's rather late. Nor have affairs with cigarettes and enumerable cups of coffee helped the matter.

Often, lately, I'll awake on the verge of settling down under the sheets, on the cusp of some dream, and I feel myself shaking slightly, My heart racing, my entire body full of little tremors. Like an inability to let myself go entirely, to sink, hanging onto wakefulness with one last digit and flailing above the abyss.

Interesting that people typically reach for the same metaphor--falling--to describe both the act of sleep and those initial, reckless pangs of love. Both can have the significance of a leap of faith, a hope that you will come out the other side complete, intact.

Interestingly, I've don't think I experience these little earthquakes, these trains passing through the tunnels of sleep when I'm sleeping with someone close by (otherwise, they would have surely told me)...