I was okay with having woken late in the morning, since I was awake for more of the night than I could handle. So much to handle, at 2 am, at 4 am, I had to pick up the Emerson.
I laughed, I shut the book, I read L’Homme and La Mer, I turned off the light, I laughed, I failed to return to sleep. I listened to “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink” and did just sit there and drink. Though I failed to return to sleep, I did not turn on the light, or sit there and drink. I did not try to read Emerson. I lay there alone and patient in the dark. “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Think.”
Sometimes, I thought how that one passage of Emerson seemed to relieve the moral imperative of another passage. Sometimes I felt anxious that I was not asleep, and of what that would mean for me the next day at work, and sometimes I would tell myself “don’t think, don’t think–” for it was Thought, I imagined, that was somehow keeping me awake, rather than what was keeping me awake keeping me thinking — thinking “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.”
Then I woke with pleasant dreams and I spent some of the time lying there, trying to live again in my dreams, my dreaming self being spatially so close to my conscious self it seemed incomprehensible that I couldn’t shift back and forth. I spent some of the time, knowing I would be lying there for a while, seeing if those “visions,” (what are they called again?*), on the insides of my eye lids would appear (I’d been looking for them too in the middle of the night) then rose for work.
* phosphenes.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 