This article was originally published in Sleep issue of The Mockingbird magazine.
When the pandemic stuck in 2020, upending life as I knew it, I was startled to read so many accounts of people being unable to sleep, and suffering dreadful nightmares when they finally managed to drift off. Physicians and psychologists reported that they felt overwhelmed by the number of people pleading for medication to help them get a good night’s sleep.
Meanwhile I had been sleeping soundly, with few dreams of note. I wasn’t feeling guilty about that, but did recall the comment a Benedictine monk once made when I said, after finishing a book tour that took me to 17 cities in 21 days, that I didn’t mind it that much. He said, “Maybe you were just too dense to notice what was really going on.” I’d been affiliated with Benedictine men and women since 1983, and his astute observation didn’t surprise me — he was right. I sometimes feel that not paying attention is how I get through life, and one day my tombstone will read: “She just didn’t notice.”
My attention span seems basically OK, but I do confess to a deep-seated disinterest in analyzing myself and the events in my life. This can manifest as callous indifference, but in its more positive aspect it is “detachment.” Considered a monastic virtue, detachment means that we refuse to be distracted by unimportant things, so that we can focus on what really matters. On my book tour, this meant being able to discount the considerable discomforts of daily air travel so that I could better enjoy the people I was meeting — readers, booksellers, and the journalists who had been tasked with interviewing me.
But I do sometimes wonder if my habitual attitude towards life equates to sleepwalking much of the time. When some Benedictine women asked me to prepare a talk on a medieval nun for an academic conference, I was thrilled to do it, as it enabled me to write about a fierce woman and magnificent writer who should be better-known, Mechtild of Magdeburg. But when conference organizers asked about my methodology, I was stymied. I had no idea how I had done what I’d done. The piece did contain some good stories, so I finally wrote something fancy about narrative as methodology, and that sufficed.
I know that sleep changes over the course of our lives, and remember being stunned, when my oldest nieces became teenagers, that they needed much more sleep than just a few years before: ten to twelve hours a night. It seems that they needed all that sleep to help them make the transition from childhood to adolescence.
Photograph by Meg Birnbaum from the ongoing series Little Sorrow, Little Joys © the artist.
When I was in my early twenties, still naïve and rather slow to embrace adulthood, I had a sequence of nightmares — many details of which I still recall 50 years later — that led me to seek help from a Jungian therapist. She helped me get my life in better order, and I learned enough from her that years later I could recognize that what might have seemed a nightmare was not. Riding in the boxcar of a speeding freight train with another woman, someone my age, I suddenly rose up and threw her out the open door. They were parts of myself I was discarding, and I needed to let them go.
Writers often have an intense and difficult relationship with sleep. Coleridge and Keats had plenty to say about how the writing process invades both the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. I gained a new perspective on this many years ago when I was making a retreat at a Benedictine abbey and I complained to an older monk that I had hoped to get a lot of writing done, but mostly I was just sleeping. He replied, “Sometimes sleep is the most spiritual thing you can do.”
Like many writers, I’ve often dreamt I was writing something great, enjoying specific words and images that I felt sure I’d remember, only to have it all vanish on waking. If a poem or piece of prose I’m working on has truly penetrated my mind, I sometimes find it nudging me out of sleep, with a specific suggestion about how to improve a line, or delete one, or add something new. When I was finishing The Cloister Walk, my memoir of time spent among Benedictine monks, the book would not leave me or my sleep alone. I settled into a schedule of rising every 15 minutes or so to work on the book, and then going back to sleep for another 15 minutes. The next night I would sleep for seven or eight hours. This went on for over two weeks: one night on, one night off. I knew that the bizarre schedule was unsustainable, and that if I hadn’t had that every-other-night of blessed, uninterrupted sleep, I would have been in trouble. But it worked; I survived, and was able to improve the book considerably.
I was in my 40s then. I’m in my mid-70s now, and suspect that such an aberrant sleep schedule would no longer serve me or my writing. I was in my mid-50s when, not long after my husband and I had celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, he died from the cancer that had plagued him for years. A physician warned me that I’d probably not be able to sleep through the night for a while after his death, and advised me to be careful. If I began suffering from severe sleep deprivation, he wanted me to seek help. I was grateful for his advice, as it helped me understand my many nights of interrupted sleep as a normal part of grieving. And on many occasions, after I woke in the middle of the night, I would sit up in bed and use that sleepless time to savor memories of my husband.
People over 70 appear to need much less sleep than adolescents. I know people in their 80s and 90s who do just fine with five hours a night. I usually manage six or seven hours, but I also find myself napping more, drifting off over a book or crossword puzzle in the middle of the afternoon. It’s a new experience. My mother once said that when I was a child, one way she could tell I was sick was if I was able to sleep during the day. I’m sure I was a terror: I now know that nap time means that Mom gets some time to herself. But when I was young I didn’t want to miss anything. I guess I don’t mind that so much anymore.
Maybe being able to accept sleep as a God-given grace and a blessing is a sign of maturity, an indication that I’m more ready for what will be the last years of my life. Sleep is a healer that we apparently need on a regular basis in order to maintain good mental and physical health. Sleep — even interrupted sleep — brings with it powerful, mysterious gifts that I may never consciously recognize. One thing I do know: that the dropping off of consciousness, which seems to come out of nowhere, allows me what I need in order to face what the next day will bring.
Kathleen Norris is the author of Journey: New & Selected Poems, and nonfiction books including Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Acedia & Me. She’s the co-founder of SoulTelegram, a bi-weekly e-newsletter on cinema and literature.
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