It's an ancient commonplace — sleep is the image of death. In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end. "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare: "sleep thou ape of death," "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc.
My own personal sleep is so wracked with awakenings and nightmares and night-sweats and fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue that I can't easily think of it as a preparation for anything. For me, sleep is rather a task, an effort, than a period of oblivion. I want my tombstone to be inscribed with the motto, "No more insomnia, forever."
But just six weeks ago, I experienced a pure "somnus imago mortis" moment. I was on a gurney, drugged, prepared for surgery. I was wheeled into a room. Time came to a complete halt. And then several hours later I was awakened. Nothing — nothing — intervened from the time that I was put under until the moment when I came to. (Perhaps there was an amnesic in the drug cocktail — I wouldn't know.)
It was such a profound and eventless sleep that it has, in fact, prepared me for the sleep of death. There was not a whisper, not a thought, nothing. Now, at last, I know how it will be.
In the hospital, there was a very welcome rebirth. But why, then, does the phrase, "I have been half in love with easeful death" continue to resonate in my brain?
Leave a Reply