DARK NIGHTS AND DEEP SHADOWS

There is a line in a song that goes:  ‘Do the tigers come at night and rip your house to shreds’, it seems so appropriate to describe what I call those sleepless nights that follow the busiest day but don’t bring rest. Just when you want it all to switch off, for your mind to be empty and calm, and you are slipping into the stillness of that inky place, that always precedes the darkness of sleep, the tigers will come.

Our lives are determined by rhythms and rituals, we are programmed from an early age that once settled into the comfort of our bed, sleep will come as naturally as nightfall. Sleep is healing and restorative, but it is also a respite we take for granted, and when even the brightest day seems like a dark place, we welcome the losing of the light as the night wins. Virgil wrote “It is the time when first sleep begins for weary mortals and by the gifts of the gods creeps over them most welcomely”.

Chamfort believed that ‘living is an illness to which sleep provides relief’, which seems a little extreme but for minds full of torment perhaps he wasn’t too far off the mark. For sleeplessness certainly leads to illness and generates an inability to cope, which becomes a self perpetuating cycle.

So use every means available to you to bring about that state of dreamless un-invaded sleep, and as you let go and feel your senses pass into forgetfulness, the cares of the day will silently slip away.

“A bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing”. Keats.