To achieve good health, you must maintain a regular sleep schedule, and be able to get back to sleep once you are awake. At least eight hours of sleep—or nine hours, or even more, if you include the time you spend awake, trying to get back to sleep—is essential. Scientists who study sleep patterns stress the significance of stress, which makes it hard not only to get to sleep but to get back to sleep if you wake up in the night. They advise you to just go back to sleep.
Every night, sunrise is approaching at speeds of up to a thousand miles an hour, depending on how far you are from the equator. Try to get back to sleep faster than that, by clenching your eyes tightly shut and going back to sleep in a hurry. If that doesn’t work, unclench your eyes, re-close them in the regular way, and then go back to sleep at a normal speed. Since you’ve started thinking about this, the dawn, glinting pink on the cold, endless waves of the ocean, has reached the point in the Atlantic where the Titanic sank. In terms of getting back to sleep, nothing is to be gained by imagining this.
So just go back to sleep. Experts suggest the following mental exercise: imagine that Donald Trump is lying next to you in the bed. He is wearing snug cotton pajamas printed to look like his signature blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. You are happy to have this chance to tell him a few things you think he ought to know. You start to tell him, but he responds by fake-snoring, in order to drown out what you are saying. The snoring would not fool anybody, so you raise your voice. Soon you are sound asleep.
No, you’re not. You’re awake—fortunately! Death may be coming for you this very night, and now you will be awake to deal with him when he gets here. The Centers for Disease Control recommends that, when you hear the shaft of Death’s scythe bumping on the stairs, you should get under the sheets down at the foot of the bed with your arms over your head in the “braced and cowering” position, and then pile all the rest of the covers on top of you; that way, maybe he won’t be able to get you. This advice goes back to the days of the Black Death, in the fourteenth century, and to the famous painting by Giuseppe Caggiano which shows Death at the gates of Hell. In the painting, Death has just handed Satan the list of the souls that he is bringing in. They are visible in the background, walking single file into the flames below. The Devil is looking at Death disapprovingly, and Death is saying, “There was one I couldn’t get because he scrunched way down under the covers” (my translation from the original Umbrian).
Death is like anybody else, just putting in his time, which is eternity. Another way to get back to sleep is to think about him and Mrs. Death. Imagine you’re on one of those super-luxury cruise ships, and Death and Mrs. Death are in the next cabin. He leaves his scythe in the corridor to be sharpened. As you and the dawn reach the place where the Titanic sank, you realize that you have neglected to bring food along, and the ship doesn’t provide any. Even worse, when you’re hungry, it’s that much harder to get back to sleep. Searching for a vending machine, you pass Mrs. Death in the corridor. No point in asking her if she has anything to eat in her cabin—she’s Mrs. Death, after all. Very skeletal, but not unattractive. In fact, you have several tattoos that look like her.
Death (the condition, not the guy) is the one “sleep” that is not essential for health—quite the opposite! Sleep may be essential for health, but waking up is even more essential. So, from that perspective, if you can’t get back to sleep, with Mrs. Death in the next stateroom piling up room-service dishes to leave outside the door, along with the scythe for the steward to sharpen (so the ship does provide food, after all, but maybe only for V.I.P.s)—with all that clattering going on, you can’t get back to sleep? That’s not entirely bad, if waking up is equally (or even more) important for good health. You don’t have to worry about waking up or not waking up because, thank God, you’re awake already.
Now Trump is actually asleep. His real snoring is incredibly loud, and so powerful that, when he inhales, all the items in the stateroom, including some of the smaller pieces of furniture, get suctioned by the indraft until they are clustered around his nose and his wide-open mouth. Then, when he exhales, making a “B-b-b-b-b-b” sound with his lips, the items return to their original positions in the room. Soon it will be morning. ♦
