Free Sleep

What with the 'rents in town and staying with Rohinton this past month, I've been doing a lot of to-and-fro shuffling between Hoboken and Manhattan on the PATH train. Relatively early on Sunday morning I got on to the train heading out to Jersey, and was just about to bury my nose in my book, when I noticed that everyone else around me in the carriage was asleep.

And I mean everyone.

There were people returning home from a big night out in the city. Workers returning home after a long night shift. Others who probably slept all night but still decided to continue their naps in the train. Maybe a narcoleptic or two. It was eerily bizarre.

So I decided to convert the subway ride into my own personal laboratory for observation of human sleep behaviours.

The guy next to me had sleep-induced-jello-neck. Each time the train swayed (and sometimes even without this), his head would swing wildly from side to side. Unfortunately, one side was my shoulder. Kind of weird, having a strange guy's head periodically bop on your shoulder. But having slept on many stranger's shoulders before in the past, I knew this was just my time to contribute back to the shoulder-support community.

Then there was the person opposite me, who was suffering from sleep-induced slackjaw. With lower mandible hanging to his chest and mouth agape invitingly to nearby hovering flies, he was releasing a continuum of resounding snores. I was intrigued by how one might be able to snore without any detectable movement of the buccal area. I have to confess, I've made many attempts since to do the same, just to see verify that it's humanly possible, but with no success.

And then there was a woman two seats down from me, who, and I promise this is true, whistled while she slept. When I was a young child, there was a boy called Conrad who sat next to me in one of my classes. One day, Conrad's dentist had drilled a hole in his front tooth, not up towards the root, but rather front-to-back like a tunnel into his mouth. It took a week, until his next dental appointment, before the hole was filled up again. During that week, Conrad's be-holed tooth betrayed him by making a whistling sound every time he breathed. Sitting next to him in class, I could hear him clear as day.
Breathe in, tweet (breathe out).
Breathe in, tweet (breathe out).
Breathe in, tweet (breathe out).
And me, caught in that in-between stage of life with an adolescent recognition of 'uncoolness' and a child's unforgiving sense of humour, had found the whole situation to be incredibly hilarious.

And that's what this woman was like, sleeping next to me. Socially victimised by her dentist into whistling while she breathed. Ha.

I thought about how embarrassing we all must be while we slept, and vowed never to let myself sleep in public again. And then I thought about it some more, and realised that sleep is probably the only time when we're entirely free with ourselves. There's something to be said for head-bopping, slack-jawing, snoring and breathe-whistling in public, with a sense of reckless abandon.

And the more I rolled the thought around in my mind, the more it appealed to me. So free, so undisturbed, so at peace with oneself. Now that I think about it, I can't wait for my next public sojourn with the land of Z's!