The Sleep Desert

Sleep deprivation is an emptiness expanding. Your mind, which used to tick along with such nimble precision, opens like a void, like someone spooned all the gray matter out. Memory and thought pass through like wispy clouds on a hard blue sky. You try to grasp them, but they flutter away or dissolve like fog in your fingers. 

The problems of the day—what to eat for breakfast and when was the last time you showered and where your keys are—cycle through the deep space of your mind again and again but you can’t quite figure out the answer. Or you pedal between two choices (oatmeal with banana or apple?) before landing on a completely different one (pancakes!).

Your body, too, echoes vacuous, wobbling as if its structural center has floated away, as if wrestling with Jupiter’s hefty gravity. Or perhaps it’s just your hollow head that throws the rest of your bones out of balance. Energy evaporates and your vacated muscles leave you falling into pillows and chairs and floors. You try to fill the void with quick sugar like candy, but in seconds it evaporates.

*

I’ve never been a good sleeper. Even as a child, I would rise in the dark, pad my bare feet to the living room aglow with lamps and laugh tracks, and complain to my parents that I could not sleep. My father is an old hand at insomnia and would suggest a glass of milk warmed in the microwave. The refrigerator bulb would capture my shadow opening the door, gripping the plastic gallon jug, pouring half a glass of two percent. I would drink the milk alone in the starlit kitchen.

Perhaps due to my childhood insomnia, I became greedy for sleep, hoarding hours like Hershey bars. I hated elementary school sleepovers, how the powdered donuts in the sharp morning light only intensified the hangover of sleeplessness. When a flock of cousins would spend the night with my three siblings and me, I would hole up in my bed at what I deemed a reasonable hour (which was earlier than even what my parents imposed). Of course it’s impossible to expect flocks of cousins to be quiet, so I would groan at each squeal and giggle and mysterious thud that slipped through the feather pillows I’d stacked over my head. And eventually anger to the tip of explosion, wrathfully whipping the door open where they were corralled in joyous nighttime play. 

During university I successfully avoided having to “pull an all-nighter”; and when I taught in Ethiopia as a fresh graduate, I would be in bed most times by missionary midnight: nine p.m. Dubbed “grandma” by more owlish friends and family, I still leave parties early (dreading the New Year’s ritual of staying up till the ball drops) and slip into the bedcovers, insatiable for sleep.

*

Motherhood has only whetted this insatiability. As of my firstborn’s ninth month, I haven’t slept a full eight hours in over a year and have been chronically sleep-deprived since his birth. I crave hours of sleep, piecing bits together here and there between nighttime feedings, trying to cobble up a few sweet minutes during the day (unsuccessfully)—and it’s never quite enough. 

Recently I’ve found my prided grammar breaking down, my speech reduced to a kind of pidgin, all infinitives and missing articles. When my husband recently asked me how to warm a pizza, all I could muster was, “Broil. Low. Five minutes.” And yesterday for church, I dressed my son in pink socks and stained dragon sweatpants and a flannel plaid shirt that was too small. During book discussions it’s all I can do to let ideas wash through my sieve of a brain, hoping for something to hold by the end. Forget about remembering anything unrelated to daily survival (the names of neighbors, the plots of novels). Mental math is a virtual impossibility. My favorite words now: “I don’t know.”

My father often tells me he listens to what difficult circumstances have to teach. More by example than by words, he gently offers this suggestion, as he would a glass of warm milk. When I listen to sleep lack, I begin to wonder if, after all my years of slumber-greed, God is lovingly leading me into a sleep desert. Away from the somniferous trove where I’d amassed honeyed hours of delicious oblivion. A trove that, though it disappeared each morning, provided me with the intellectual vim and emotional balance to sort through the day’s problems, the physical stamina to juggle choppingscrubbingchasingrunning, the refreshment to begin each day with something like hope. Insomnia has long been one of my greatest fears. How to survive without sleep? And what is God whispering in these desert winds?

*

On our evening stroll, I explain to my husband how sleep-deprivation feels like fasting. You’re existing without a crucial, life-giving need being met. You’re hungry all the time, but for rest rather than food. You’re holding a gaping lack inside, a secret, invisible emptiness. And it pushes you, in the quandary of quotidian details, to look up: pray.

Sleep deprivation has long been tied to spiritual discipline. The desert mothers and fathers (third-to-seventh-century ascetics who sought God in Middleastern deserts) strove to eradicate any element of their lives that hindered pure communion with God. Including sleep. Sleeping arrangements—a reed mat, a pile of straw, a single sheet of sheepskin—were intentionally disruptive to slumber. Many slept only sitting up or on a reclining seat to remain alert. “One hour's sleep a night is enough for a monk if he is a fighter,” said Abba Arsenius. This same father (who deemed sleep a “wicked servant”) would pass whole nights awake. And Abba Bessarion testified, “For fourteen days and nights, I have stood upright in the midst of thorn-bushes, without sleeping.”

As one who sleeps on a thick mattress, padded in feather pillows, cool sheets, and a comforter, I find it difficult to submit to such severity. I hold on to passages of Scripture like the one attributed to Solomon (divinely given “a wise and discerning mind” like none other): “It is in vain that you rise up early / and go late to rest, / eating the bread of anxious toil; / for he gives to his beloved sleep.” And David writes of his slumber, “I lay down and slept; / I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.” Sleep is a gift from God, the fruit of humble trust in divine providence. 

Even Jesus, who entered finity in a body, needed sleep. He repeatedly withdrew from the crowd to rest (which, I would assume, sometimes meant catching a few winks). Once in a storm-tossed fishing boat, his shocked disciples found him sleeping. 

The very creation God designed follows the ritual of cyclical oblivion. On his first day of world-making, God separated the light from the darkness, leading humans naturally into slumber with each set sun. Whether nocturnal or otherwise, creatures rhythmically curl up in nests, caves, thickets, beds. 

Perhaps many desert mothers and fathers would agree that sleep is a divine lullaby sung into the rhythm of creation. Indeed, they had to sleep at some point. But sleep deprivation as a spiritual practice? How could chronic sleeplessness be thought so essential for inner transformation? 

*

In the first few months after my son was born, sleep lack shattered me. In between feedings, I was often too alert to sleep. As a fresh-born mother, I felt I had been baptized into a kind of feral awareness I’d never before experienced. At night I was obsessively attentive to my son’s tiny exhales, his smallest whimpers. I was petrified he would stop breathing. Sometimes when I couldn’t hear his breaths, I would stare at his chest until I saw the subtle rising. Meister Eckhart said “we are all meant to be mothers of God,” and while his words are generally interpreted to mean the process of birthing Christ within us, I wonder if they could allude to attending him as well. Would this kind of attentiveness, that of a mother for her child, be the kind of divine-ward attention the desert fathers and mothers cultivated in the dark?

In one sense, wakefulness could betray a lack of trust. In the raw days of early motherhood, I chose to eat anxious bread rather than let God hold my son through the night. Just as I give my son milk when he wakes (as my father would offer it for my childhood insomnia), God offers his breast in the night when shadows glower. Divine eyes watch over my slumber like a mother over her newborn’s. Could humility be the opposite of sleeplessness? But if wakefulness is rooted in trust and ferocious motherlove, if it attunes me to his subtlest flutters, I wonder what gifts might bloom in the sunless hours. I wonder what I might see.

Though the desert mothers and fathers acknowledged the necessity of some sleep, too much became a barrier to vision. Abba Poemen said, “Because of our need to eat and to sleep, we do not see the simple things.” I think of biblical prophets like Zechariah, whom an angel “wakened…as a man who is wakened out of his sleep” in order to see a fantastic vision of a forty-nine-lipped lamp aglow between a pair of olive trees. If sleeplessness cultivates vision, I wonder what simple things I am seeing now, that I couldn’t have seen with more sleep. Am I more aware of divine graces hidden in the weave of daily existence? Does God manifest himself in uncanny ways in the dark? I think of those nights in deserted Ohioan cornfields or Montanan forests, far from the light-polluted city I call home: how glorious the Milky Ways, those galaxies of stars!

But in between those bursts of heavenly light, how deep the dark. How many times have I nursed my son in the night, fearful of the shadows in the corners, and prayed against any evil lurking there! Perhaps recalling Paul (For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood), the desert fathers and mothers kept awake to guard against the attacks of the devil. They testify to bone-and-muscle wrestlings with demons but were also highly attuned to the inner, unseen ones. Evagrius and others wrote of demons and evil thoughts synonymously. This rings true: I’ve found that in the night the mental shadows of untruth and anxiety expand out of proportion, take on fangs and scowls. Midnight wakefulness could be a call not only to enjoy the stars, but to fight.

*

In the dark newborn hours, I began to attune myself to God’s voice. I recalled my mother telling me that struggling to sleep could be a divine call to intercede on behalf of someone else. I could exchange sleeplessness for prayerfulness. She told stories like the one of the Gospel-salted old lady who arose in the night to pray, and at that very hour across the world someone’s need was miraculously met. Hungry to redeem the sleepless hours (and also have something to keep me awake while my son nursed), I began to pray. Nestled against my son in the quiet night, God brought me people to pray for, including myself.

 Other times I would savor morsels of Scripture. (Some of the desert fathers recommended passing half the night in sleep, the other half imbibing the Psalms.) But there was a sweetness in the silence too, just being with God, enjoying the milk of his presence in the dark. Who knows how secret nighttime prayers, the hidden words of healing and hope and anguish uttered by mothers in the Egyptian desert and in American cities, might nourish the catholic body of believers, and even the world?

*

According to the desert parents, the discipline of sleeplessness helped free them from their physical needs and desires, and ultimately, the imprisonment of their own will. Abba Poemen, who often retreated for 40-day stretches, said, “I have discovered one simple thing: that if I say to my sleep, ‘Go,’ it goes, and if I say to it, ‘Come,’ it comes.” Sleeplessness is showing me that sleep is not my ultimate master, as fasting reminds me that I do not live by bread alone. Though sleep is as needful as physical sustenance, giving it up offers an opportunity to depend on preternatural grace. Sleep may be rooted in humility, but intentional, limited sleep deprivation (in the form of communal vigils or individual midnight prayers) could be, too. In relinquishing sleep, the desert parents could entrust their vulnerable, wearied bodies and minds to the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Sometimes, at its nadir, after weeks or months of little sleep, I feel a kind of exultation, a strange high. It’s similar to a feeling I’ve felt during a fast, when I feel strangely liberated from the necessity of food and its time-consuming preparation. It’s a heady feeling, the kind that comes while sipping a coupe of sparkling rosé on an empty stomach. Released from the gravity of sleep, I’m floating maybe, floating on a power beyond me.

In some desert (and European) monasteries, sleeplessness as a ritual became more elaborate. Medieval Benedictine monks went to bed at eight or nine p.m., then awoke for matins at midnight, lauds at three a.m., and prime at six a.m. This would induce a state of chronic sleep deprivation, far from the doctor-recommended seven to nine hours. Modern monasteries seem to have less severe schedules. Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where Kathleen Norris lived while writing The Cloister Walk, bookends each day with prayers at seven in the morning and seven at night. Perhaps this shift in moderation is rooted in the reality that spiritual disciplines easily decompose into pride. Amma Syncletica said, “As long as we are in the monastery, obedience is preferable to asceticism. The one teaches pride, the other humility.”

Though harsh, the original monastic schedule holds some hope for a sleep-deprived mother like me. Like nursing mothers, these monks awoke at rhythmic intervals each night to feed each other (and themselves) prayers. Or perhaps it’s more apt to say that, like babies, they awoke to be fed, God as mother alert to their tiniest whimpers. In the middle of the night when my son cries and I cannot sleep, I imagine God gently nudging my shoulders to receive a cup of sweet, nourishing milk.

*

In my husband’s home country of Ethiopia, as in numerous faith communities around the world, vigils are embedded into the liturgical calendar. Though largely abandoned by many churches (including my own), this practice of communal nighttime prayer is not without scriptural basis. Just as David enjoyed the gift of sleep, he also gave it up to pray: “On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.” and “At midnight, I rise to praise you.” Jesus calls his listeners to keep their lamps burning, remaining alert for his coming, “even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak.” In the book of Acts, Luke writes of Paul and Silas praying and singing hymns “about midnight” from their prison cell. I wonder, too, if the biblical prophets were woken in the deep space of night, John and Ezekiel chewing honeyed parchment in a kind of dream. What have churches missed in forgoing such midnight services? What have we lost in gaining sleep?

My husband has told me how the night before Easter and Christmas, believers attend church for prayer, fasting, and song. When I lived in Ethiopia, I would see the believers in the morning, as I drove to my own services. The worshippers would flock out of the church doors and gather along the roadsides, dressed in gauzy white netelas blinking in the sun. They would be walking to break their fast over tables laden with good things. My husband recalls those mornings of his childhood, when the family would gather to feast on tender meats, lightly dressed greens, soft white cheese, a host of spiced stews—chickpea, lentil, potato, carrot, beet—and baskets of injera, crêpe-like bread rolled up in scrolls.

*

After months of particularly egregious sleep deprivation, I Googled some of its side effects. Physically, the toll can range from the mild (lack of energy and weight gain) to the severe (diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and even decreased life expectancy). Emotionally, sleep deprivation leads to stress, anxiety, irritability. But what has been perhaps hardest for me (as one who has always thrived in academics and relished dense philosophers) has been the mental deterioration: slower thinking, impoverished memory, poor or risky decision making, hallucinations. 

Weeks after my son was born, my husband would wake in the night to my thrashing about in bed, digging through the sheets, crying, “Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?” Even more recently, he heard a thud in the night and found me on the hardwood floor, searching under the bed, crying my son’s name. 

My hallucinations are evidence more of a madwoman than a mystic, but I’m intrigued by a Psychology Today article connecting the desert, sleep deprivation, and mystical experiences. Considering the desert fathers and mothers, the psychologist recounts how the isolation and severe conditions of the desert (in addition to the self-imposed privations of food, shelter, and sleep) lent themselves to mysticism. Sleep loss in particular reduces our capacity for higher-level critical thinking, thinking which may impede our ability to experience supernatural states of consciousness. Said another way: sleep loss could free us to apprehend the mystical. Modern psychology may use such science to explain away visions like Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut or Theresa of Avila’s castle. But I wonder at how God could speak to human beings in a particular way, in a stratum beyond metacognition. Perhaps Abba Poeman was right when he said that sleep inhibited our ability to see. 

Again and again mystics from John of the Cross to Meister Eckhart invite their followers to release their rational thought in order to better experience and understand God. Though suspicious of visions, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing encourages readers to “bide in this darkness” beyond the reaches of their knowledge, because God cannot be understood with reason. In fact, the author argues that everything—sensory experience, memory, knowledge of any kind—should be “hid under a cloud of forgetting.” Surely the God who wired human brains reveals himself in mind and memory, but to a sleep-deprived soul who cannot be trusted to remember much of anything, the possibility of experiencing God despite (and even through) brain fog is encouraging. Maybe in my fogginess, I have an opportunity to sense God in a different way than if I was fully rested. A heartening thought this: God graciously and uniquely speaks to each of us, in whatever state we happen to be.

My son and I take daily walks, and on my sleepiest walks I simply exist. I am in a state of unthinking (because, I cannot think). Sister Mary Margaret Funk, former prioress of a Benedictine monastery in my hometown, explains this experience: “I let my thoughts come and then let them go. When I do this, ceaseless prayer begins to rise…My mind is alert, awake, receiving.” Unthinking, I cannot form coherent thoughts, meal plan, arrange my schedule. Paradoxically, my sleepy mind can be more attentive, because I simply am. Unable to create, I can only hold out my hands to receive the gifts of creation. Senses abloom, I gawk at the autumnal light glowing in yellow leaves, a dying red bush rustling in a kind of flame. I am able to listen: to leaf chatter, to the creaks in my own body, to God. Maybe God has deprived me of sleep to pause my ceaseless stream of thoughts. To call me to quiet.

When I’m sleep-deprived, the controlled, prescriptive, selfish prayers I often pray on my walks dissolve. I cannot ask for specifics. Much of all I can muster is “God have mercy.” God have mercy on my mother. God have mercy on my father. God have mercy on my son. Or (inspired by a scene of Fred Rogers praying at his bedside in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), I simply say people’s names. Elaine, Don, Kaki, Girmesh, Jeremiah… All I can do is uphold each soul to God, allowing him to pray, to sustain my friends and family in the particular ways I cannot articulate. In this way I am, as Henri Nouwen suggests, bringing them into the presence of God, into his heart. And when even names elude me, I can fling groans heavenward.

*

In the midnight vigils, in the nighttime psalmody, in giving up not just sleep but food and home and family and every delicious taste of the world, the ultimate yearning of the desert mothers and fathers was simple: God. I’m reminded of Kierkegaard’s definition of faith in Fear and Trembling: releasing something in obedience to God, and fully believing you will receive it back again. To choose to release sleep, then, seems to be a kind of faith. 

There is space to enact faith, too, when sleep is taken rather than given. (I can trust his strength, that daily manna dewing in the wilderness, will uphold my weakened body.) But what if this sleep desert of early motherhood was preparation to practice, of my own volition, in my own small way, the spiritual discipline of sleeplessness? 

On the night he was betrayed, hours before offering his own body to be broken on a tree, hours before shouldering the guilt of the ages—and the wrath of God, Jesus invites his disciples to pray with him. He returns, twice, to find them dozing. (I imagine myself crumpled in a heap of robes among them.) While Jesus was drinking his bitter cup, he was offering a sweet one to his disciples: the milk of divine presence, of communion with God himself. Oh, that when God offers me the cup of prayer, I would drink it.

*

While discussing sleep deprivation the other day, a fellow weary mother and I lamented the challenges of our little ones’ four a.m. wake-up calls. But then she reminded me about one of our former colleagues, an Ethiopian named Ruth. Ruth would often wake up at four in the morning, robes uncrumpled, and, of her own volition, pray. All my midnight prayer sessions have been unplanned, reactive. (I am awake because my son wakes. I am awake because, however much I want to, I cannot sleep.) I marvel at Ruth. 

 “That’s where she found her joy,” my friend said.

Joy. Not duty, not obligation. Joy. I wonder at this delight, not in hoarding hours of sleep like candy—but, like the desert mothers and fathers, in giving them up (Blessed are the hungry) to feast on something richer, fuller (for they shall be filled): sweet scrolls unfurled, that dewy manna, Logos pressed to opened lips. And a cup, a breast, overflowing.

Published in The Windhover | Volume 26.2 (Print)