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  • The Long FallThe Weird Dream That Was 2020
  • Simon Han (bio)
Keywords

sleepwalking, 2020, Black Lives Matter, Trump, pandemic, COVID-19, dream, America

Sleepwalking terrifies me. With zombies, at least, it's clear that the person inside the body is lost. The sleepwalker, however, occupies a space where agency and identity become blurred, where one might act like a sloppier version of oneself (see: sleep cooking, sleep driving) or in ways profoundly different from who one is (see: sleep sex with strangers, sleep murder!). It's a phenomenon, as Dr. Rosalind D. Cartwright states in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, that is difficult to study, not only for the logistical challenge of hooking up a sleepwalker in a lab, but for the famously mysterious terrain of the unconscious.

As far as I know, I have not been, and am currently not, a sleepwalker. As a writer, I'm drawn to sleepwalking for its unknowability—not just to me but to sleepwalkers themselves. During sleepwalking, Cartwright says, "unconscious motives are driving physical behavior without consciousness…and without memory of the event after waking consciousness returns." I imagine the sleepwalker who goes to bed and wakes up on their front lawn, in their car, or standing in front of a burning stove will ask themselves what happened, what it means. Structure follows experience; as with dreams, we apply the reading retroactively.

So it can be with stories. In her memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, Samantha Harvey suggests that writing, rather than drawing from the subconscious, "is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious." For me, writing feels most alive when I reach that fleeting dreamlike state in which I forget, if only for the breath that it takes to finish a sentence, that I am writing at all. Yet writing is also an act of constraint: The sentences lasso the intangible into a tangible form. Hence the use of metaphors—like sleepwalking itself, employed not only in this essay, but in our attempts this year to make sense of our reality. Is this actually happening? Someone please wake me up. Maybe this is one of the guiding rhythms of life: The inexplicable happens, so we make it explicable.

In The Fall of Sleep, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes, "Just as night represents a time of cosmic rhythm and sleep a time of biological rhythm, so also does sleep compose in itself the rhythm in which its profound nature is reflected." We find such rhythms before we enter sleep, by singing lullabies and rocking babies. We find them in the way we exit sleep, swinging from the haze of dream to the plain crush of light through our windows. Our adherence to this rhythm allows us to dream a ghost and wake up relieved, as Borges once stated, referencing Coleridge. To dream a ghost while still awake is another matter.

During the early weeks of lockdown in the States, we may have seen our fair share of ghosts. From the eerie photographs of a vacant Times Square to the teary-eyed man crouched outside a bedroom window, meeting his grandchild for the first time, we might have processed these images by thinking of ourselves as living in a story about a global pandemic. We might have called this story surreal, even as events insisted otherwise. In February and March, the killings of unarmed [End Page 18]


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[End Page 19] Black Americans remained so precedented that news of Ahmaud Arbery's and Breonna Taylor's deaths did not capture national attention until months later. Meanwhile, the pandemic exposed the inequity long baked into our economic, housing, and health-care systems, harming Americans at disproportionate rates along class and racial lines. George Floyd, it turns out, had lost his job due to the pandemic and contracted coronavirus before his death.

In all this time, we have somehow continued to sleep, albeit poorly for many of us. To sleep is to relinquish our need to protect ourselves and those we love from danger, which is easier to do when there...

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