In Praise of Sleep and Dream
Sleep
If I have a talent, it is for sleeping and about a third of my life has been spent “dead to the world”. “Did you hear those police sirens,” Stuart asks me of a morning? Those car alarms? That thunder storm? Well, no!
I regularly sleep eight or nine or ten hours of a night but in my prime I could do eleven or twelve and I could sleep on any surface. The concrete floor of a hotel rooftop? No problemo! In between the seats on a plane bound for Moscow (oh the roomy old days of air travel!)? Absolutely!
On vacation in the Greek Islands in 1963, Mike and I slept out a lot on stony beaches because we couldn’t afford to rent a room. I managed to sleep from sunset to sunrise lying on my stomach with only a thin sleeping bag between me and the pebbles. Admittedly, one night when we took a ferry to Mikonos and nestled down out of the wind on the deck next to a large container, my sleep was disturbed at times by showers of icy water. I assumed it was spray but when I woke up with the sun, I discovered we had been sleeping next to a large tank of dead fish on ice. On landing, our first order of business was to wash out our sleeping bags in the public fountain and dry them in the sun. If the smell of fish in that bag persisted, it did not stop me sleeping.
I’m pretty sure I get my gift for sleeping from my dad. He told me that, as a teenage able seaman in the merchant marine, he never got used to being woken every four hours to do his watch. When he got to be ship’s captain, his crew knew just how high the waves needed to be before the Old Man was roused from his bunk. A good night’s sleep was my dad’s go-to answer to life’s problems, and I remember how, one night in my early teens when I was facing a big exam, Dad came into my bedroom late and found me revising. He confiscated my book and switched off the light. “Stop reading and start sleeping and you’ll be fine,” he said, and in this, as in so many things, my dad was right.
Over the next years, I took Dad’s advice, put my books away early the night before an exam, got a solid eight hours, and did well--and that success mattered. In the 1950s, good exam results were rungs up an educational ladder that lower class girls like me had only recently been allowed to climb. At the age of ten, doing well in the eleven-plus exam won me a place at the top local high school. At sixteen, success in the General Certificate of Education “O” levels kept me in school when even most high school girls moved out into the world of jobs and boyfriends and babies. Success at GCE “A” level at 18 won me a third year in the sixth form and a shot at Oxford and Cambridge entrance. Success on the exam for New Hall brought me to Cambridge University, the first person in my family to go to college, and there I met Mike Gill. Mike had aced every exam he had ever taken, and he gave me exam tips that propelled me to a First Class degree and a shot at an academic career—while also becoming my husband.
When my path up the educational ladder ceased to depend on exams results, life got a lot trickier, but long hours of sleep still gave me an edge as I tried to make my professional way. As an assistant professor, I was five or more years older than my colleagues/rivals, having emigrated to the U.S. without completing my Ph.D. But thanks to all that REM sleep, I didn’t look my age--and in American departments of French, where Parisian chic was a qualification for tenure never listed in the Faculty Handbook, looks mattered. At thirty, my complexion still glowed in soft light, and in my trouser suits and leather pants I had a trendy butch look which balanced the fact that I was that rarest of birds in MLA circles in those days--a straight woman with a husband and two kids. I could not, alas, sleep my way into tenure but, in my new life as a writer I found myself zipping around giving speeches and interviews, and looking younger than my fifty years was still important to both me and my publishers. Even today in my early eighties, I get a little morale boost when a TSA official refuses to believe I am over seventy-five, or when an old friend not given to praise greets me by exclaiming, “you haven’t changed a bit.”
But sleep helps the muscles and the brain and the temper as well as the complexion, and, looking back to my forties, those were the things I most needed as I found myself living with a Type A husband who had chronic heart disease. When Mike was told by his doctors that, basically, he could drop dead at any moment, his response was to go into overdrive, and this posed a challenge to me.
The first big test of my resilience came in 1976 when Mike’s first major heart attack, and subsequent triple bypass surgery, had, by a weird chain of circumstances, led me to leave my promising slot as assistant professor of French at Wellesley College and take up a job at Yale University. I was hired as an expert in language teaching, and language courses met four times a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. As a result, in my first academic year in New Haven. I lived in Jonathan Edwards College, where I was a fellow, during the week and did all my class preparation and marking. On Friday afternoons I picked up my car from the university car park across town and drove home to Lexington, some two and a half hours, to take over the household. Our two kids were about four and ten, and, after two disastrous experiments with au pair girls, Mike and I were tackling all the childcare and housework between us. For a man who was just recovering from a triple coronary bypass, had a lab to run, and his newly tenured position at Tufts to shore up, Mike’s domestic duties were, to say the least, a heavy. So, on weekends and in the vacations, I took over, allowing him to retreat and get some science done.
The year 1977-78 was a tough one for our whole family but still, returning to New Haven in the fall, I felt that I had done pretty well keeping four balls in the air—husband, kids, home, and teaching—but an interview with my head of department in October soon disabused me. In the first of my three years, said Professor Georges May sadly, I had done nothing. I had dropped the fifth ball—scholarly publication—and that was the only ball he and Yale cared about, so my contract would not be renewed. A tough year, as I say.
After leaving Yale, back home fulltime with the house and the kids and teaching part time at Harvard, I published a series of challenging translations, and wrote my first book, but, in the eyes of academia, none of that mattered. In the U.S., I discovered, you got only one chance at tenure, so the life as a college professor that I had worked toward all my adult life and for which I was so well suited would not be mine. I took it hard, but life in my forties was too full to leave time for repining, and strength and stamina became more important to me than looks. As I shall detail in a later chapter, as Mike’s life became more threatened by heart disease, he worked more and more intensely, and became more and more difficult to live with. During vacations, he led our family on one hairy adventure after another-- on the ski slopes in the Rockies, on the Razor’s Edge in Norway, on the Kapalua trail in Maui.
By 1986, both kids had opted out of vacations with father, but Mike and I took strenuous trips, including a snowy week in the Dolomites doing the famous iron ladder trail. Then in 1989, Mike proposed that he and I should take our April vacation camping and hiking on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, ending up with the descent to the Colorado river-and I said, as I always said, without a moment’s thought, “Sure”. This would be the most physically challenging vacation we had ever taken but it never occurred to me to question what Mike wanted to do. My husband, with his medical history, felt up for the challenge of the Grand Canyon. All I had to do was go with him.
Mike wrote a detailed account of this vacation, which I include on this website, and I remember our first day down the Bright Angel Trail as a glory. We left our pup tent pitched close to the snow-covered rim, so I was carrying only about thirty pounds in my big rucksack--sleeping bag, bed roll, food for three days, and several liters of water--while Mike had closer to fifty with the stove, cooking gear, and the water purifier. We were both quick and agile downhill walkers, so we hopped and bopped along, laughing at the silly girls in their flip flops and keeping well clear of all the mules.
We camped two nights under the stars, at the river campsite and then, to break the ascent, at Indian Garden. But going uphill has always been tough for me, and I was pushed harder than I had ever been pushed before so I puffed and panted and sweated even as the temperature dropped as I neared the rim. So intent was I on reaching our tent that I never looked back to see why my husband, who never liked to follow when he could lead, was lagging behind. It was only much later that I found out that Mike had to stop from time to time as the climb got steadily steeper to put a nitroglycerine tablet under his tongue. As it turned out, he still had another year before his heart gave up.
What I find remarkable today, after a few years of Pilates, is that it simply never crossed my mind back in 1989 that I might need to get in shape for the Grand Canyon. The words “training”, “exercise”, and “cardiovascular” had yet to enter my vocabulary. Fortified by sleep, my body had never failed me, and at forty-six my physical confidence was still unshaken. The world seems to believe that women reach their prime in their late teens or early twenties, but that was emphatically not true for me. At fifteen I had been a nerd and a wallflower. At twenty-five I was a frazzled, isolated new mom. At thirty-five I was a loyal spouse, a good mother, and a popular assistant professor at a prestigious school. At forty-five, on the brink of a whole new life as a writer and spending a golden summer on Cape Cod, I clearly remember looking in the mirror and saying to myself, “I have never felt so alive or so attractive.”
“Gill is never tired”, my mother-in-law Dorothy Gill once remarked reproachfully, and I thought at the time she was being mean. Didn’t I go to bed every night totally exhausted? But now I can see that my mother-in-law was onto something, Sleep allowed me to move through the world with a speed, efficiency, and even grace that she, poor lady--a worker bee born with a hole in her heart--could only envy.
S
o, three hearty cheers for the power of SLEEP and her sister DREAM, for, while deep in sleep, I dream and, though I have so far been too sleepy to keep a dream diary, I have been aware ever since I was young that the dream world I entered every night was of vital importance to me.
Here again I find a link with my dad. Once, when I was back home in Cardiff in, I suppose. the early 1980s, I accompanied my father on his daily walk to his university, and, as we walked, I happened to mention my dreaming. To my surprise, Dad told me that he dreamed a lot too, and we discovered that we could both sometimes pick up a dream where we had left it off the previous night. This was a rare and precious exchange between father and daughter.
As a girl, I would get so wrapped up in a dream that I would talk and become very agitated during the night. My sister, with whom I shared a room throughout my childhood, claimed she could have a conversation with me in my sleep. Later on, people sleeping in bunks near me at youth hostels told me how funny it was hearing me talking in my sleep. Unlike my son Christopher, however, I have never yet walked in my sleep. The most notable example of Chris sleepwalking occurred when we four Gills arrived in Oahu for our Hawaiian vacation in 1982 and checked into some cheap motel. Exhausted after the long journey, we all fell into deep sleep and Chris, then fourteen, got out of bed, out of the room, and out of the hotel. He was found wandering the Oahu streets in his pajamas by the police who somehow found the right hotel and put him back into bed. I slept through the whole adventure, as did Mike and Catherine.
By the time I was fully adult with a job and a family to worry about, my dreams often turned into nightmares, and these intensified after Mike died on June 30, 1990. I would awake in the middle of the night screaming and sweating and sobbing, and I had to learn to sit up in bed and stop panicking. No, I would tell myself, the family is not facing disaster. It was only in a dream that I walked into a college classroom with no idea of what I was supposed to teach. Only in a dream was I facing arrest for failing to renew my driving license or pay the mortgage or file a tax return. (Those early tax returns, let me note, were prepared without the assistance of an accountant, caused me great worry, and no doubt sent the IRS into hoots of merriment, but they were mailed well before the April 14 deadline.)
I label these nightmares of my midlife “incapacity dreams”, and, since I was deep into psychoanalytic texts at that time, I could have handled them better if they had only featured bananas, rockets, nests, pockets, pincushions, etc. My interpretation of my dreams, unlike Freud’s or Jung’s, was dismayingly prosaic. In life I was pretending to cope. In dream I knew I was out of my depth. Mike had always fixed the things that were broken, paid the bills, and come up with a successful Three-Year Plan for our family. Now he was gone, and I was taking on problems for which I had no taste or talent or preparation. I was under stress, and in dream I conjured up, vividly, all the things that could go wrong, all the things that could break. To many of you, I bet, all this will sound familiar.
By the time I hit my fifties and sixties, I must have gained confidence since my nightmares changed. They were now complex narratives about getting lost. Two cityscapes figure in those nightmares—my city of origin, Cardiff in South Wales, and Cambridge, England, where I lived for six years as an undergraduate and graduate student. In one variant of the Cambridge version, I would be wandering like a ghost around the university, seeing no one I knew, finding no pigeonhole with my name, no room allotted to me, no class registration. In another lost dream variant, I would start off in a part of the city of Cardiff that was thoroughly familiar to me and head home—only to find myself in parts of town that were new and led me further and further astray. In another variant of the Cardiff nightmare, I would be starting in the center of Cambridge and head toward a junction that led to the road that would, I was sure, take me in the direction of Cardiff, but I could never find the junction.
Once again, I feel no need of Freud or Jung to interpret these dreams. I suffer from what I have come to call orientational dyslexia, so it is unsurprising that I have nightmares about getting lost. The problem runs in my family, and it means I resort to mnemonics to tell left from right, east from west, north from south, and even up from down. Panels of switches pose a problem for me, as do sets of drawers, and if I don’t keep an eye out for landmarks, I can get lost coming home from the store.
But, on a deeper level of analysis, the foundations of my sense of self are my happy childhood with my Cardiff family and my successful life as a student at Cambridge University. At nineteen I left Cardiff for Cambridge and put my childhood behind me. At twenty-five I left Cambridge for the United States and put my student life behind. Now, in my post-menopausal years, I was an American citizen who felt and sounded foreign to both the Brits and the Americans, a Ph.D. who had dropped out of academia, and an unemployed writer trying my hand at non-fiction. As a citizen I was lost and there was no way to go back to My Cardiff. As a professional I was struggling and there was no way back to My Cambridge.
All this feels very long ago. Today, at eighty-one, I have few nightmares and each night I enter the dreamworld with fervent anticipation. In dream I find fun and adventure as a superwoman version of my past self. Not just strong and agile and able to sing in tune like the young me but doing things I have never been able to do—ride a horse, swim a lake, run a mile. In dream I am sexy and full of desire, and I have weird psychedelic adventures, all in living color and extraordinary detail. Through my octogenarian dreams, I am discovering to my astonishment that I have not just a vivid imagination but a talent for plot and a command of the dramatic scene. Is it possible that, given the right recreational drugs in my forties, I could have found access to this part of myself and become a writer of fiction? Maybe, when life forces me to go onto oxycontin and magic mushrooms, I will write a bestseller. Who knows?
In the meanwhile, even more than sex and adventure, my dreams offer me a transitory comfort. In my dream world I am almost always surrounded by the small children who, as children and grandchildren, have given me the purest joy.
Best of all, in the background of my dreams, not caring to call attention to themselves but simply there since THERE is where they were once and will always be for me, are my beloved dead, the ones who, for all my happy, sociable, loving life in the present, I cannot replace and always mourn.
