Slipping inside my dwelling, I closed the door carefully behind me and paused briefly in the entranceway. The interior of the house was as silent and dark as the tomb. Evidently, Muddy had remained ignorant of my surreptitious departure from the house after supper. Had my absence been discovered, I would undoubtedly have found her seated at the kitchen table, anxiously awaiting my return.

Making my way down the lightless but utterly familiar hallway towards my bedchamber, I cautiously opened die door and stole inside. The curtains of my window had not been drawn, and moonlight—pale and ghostly—streamed through the unobstructed panes. So profound was my fatigue that the mere prospect of exchanging my garments for a nightshirt plunged my soul into despair; Staggering towards the bed, I collapsed face downward upon the mattress and fell instantly asleep.

To those who—for whatever reason of bodily or emotional suffering—have endured its prolonged deprivation, there is nothing on earth (or in heaven) more devoutly to be desired than sleep. Nowhere is this truth made more wrenchingly evident than in the justly renowned soliloquy of the tormented protagonist of Shakespeare’s magnificent (if, perhaps, somewhat imperfectly motivated) tragedy Macbeth:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

And yet, while few passages in literature possess more of the truly sublime, these lines do not take sufficient account of a no less important, though absolutely contrary, phenomenon—the degree to which sleep itself may, on occasion, be the source, not of healing, solace, and refreshment, but of the very opposite effects: to wit, nervous agitation, spiritual unease, and even more debilitating exhaustion.

Such, unhappily, was the case with the vexed and tormented slumber I experienced that night Awakening with a sob from a harrowing dream—in which a chimerical creature with vulture wings, a woman’s head, and the body and legs of an arachnid pursued me through a labyrinth of subterranean chambers—I lay prone upon the mattress and stared wildly about my chamber, From the intensity of the daylight suffusing the room, I deduced that the morning was already well advanced, and—consulting my clock—saw to my astonishment that the time was approaching the noon hour!

Dragging myself from my bed, I stood for a moment with throbbing head and reeling brain, like a man attempting to readjust to solid land following a protracted voyage at sea. Eventually my dizziness subsided, and—crossing unsteadily to the washstand which stood at the opposite end of my chamber—I splashed a handful of cold water onto my face before regarding myself in my shaving-mirror.