Sleep Sweet Sleep Essay, Research Paper

The word ‘exhausted’ could hardly describe the way that I felt Wednesday morning. My son has asthma, and on Tuesday it was worse than normal because he had contracted tonsillitis. Any infection at all means that we will both be up all night dealing with asthma attacks. By the time Wednesday night arrived, I could have slept soundly on a pile of rocks. Hunter finally went to bed, which meant that I could do the same. On any other night, I would have taken a long, hot bath and then climbed into bed and read from whatever book I had laying on the night stand until I could no longer hold my eyes open, but not that night. There was no need to slip into pajamas because I hadn’t made it out of them yet. I locked the doors, shut off the lights, and went straight to bed. I pulled back the blue floral comforter on my bed, revealing the matching sheet on the mattress, and climbed in. “Ahh, this feels goooood,” I said to myself. I was enveloped in soft, luxurious splendor. The pillow-top mattress embraced my weary body as if to say, “There, there, I’ve gotcha. Let it all go.” The burning tension in my neck and back began to melt away as I surrendered my strength to the bed. With the comforter draped across my chest, I tucked its fluffiness in around me and found a comfortable place at my side for my arms. The sheet was tucked in a little too tight at the bottom, so I kicked towards the ceiling a couple of times to get it just right. A few strategic moves later, I was in position to sail into dream land. As I scanned my eyes around the room one last time to see if there was anything that I had forgotten, I saw what looked like someone sitting at the edge of my bed. Once I focused in on the strange shape, I realized that Hunter had left a shirt and his baseball cap draped over one of the posts at the foot of the bed. The clock on the VCR, sitting on my dresser in the corner of the room, monotonously flashed 12:00 AM, as if to say, “Set me. Set me. Set me.”

The light breeze emanating from the ceiling fan, located directly above me, made the room just cool enough to need the blanket. The slight, methodical ching, ching, chinging of the chain hitting against the light fixture attached to the fan would have been a good rhythm to count sheep to; however, that was definitely unnecessary. The usually irritating buzzing of the traffic outside my bedroom window didn’t even bother me; in fact, it was singing me to sleep. “Dear heavenly Father, forgive mmme forrrr mmmy……..ZzZzZzZz.”