The Land of Nod

The Land of Nod

From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.


Robert Louis Stevenson

My naked mattress. A firm and supportive woven mesh of rolling gentle hills, field strip patterns and shady hedgerows of piping at its edge. The most comfortable place in my world, where a hidden technology of tough springs in little linen cells mould themselves to my spine and push in all the right places. Its where I retire at night, my upstairs world where I force my way into the elusive land of nod. Unconscious I am free to walk in the mountainous empty wilds and crowded living streets where my body will no longer carry me; more beautiful, ugly, magical or terrible than they ever were in reality....well maybe they were a few times. The temptation is strong to surrender oneself to this realm permanently, not to return to the consciousness of pain and pills and frustrations and the torturing knowledge of might have beens. But always the guilty morning comes and shames me into getting up.

My waking world is increasingly restricted to the sofa where I spend on average 15 out of the 17 hours of the downstairs day. It is a sagging and uncomfortable corner of a squalid little room but it is where I live in the "real" world, where I watch the world's parade pass by on my computer screen and try to engage and exercise my mind and hands with books and crafts, all conducted like some bizarre contortionist; sideways, my left arm trapped under my weight. Ironically my nightly insomniac struggle is here reversed. I fight the fog of sleep that tries to engulf me after a few paragraphs read or stitches stitched or words written....but it is so seductive, such a better place to escape to....and if temptation fails to claim me it takes me by brute force anyway.