Wordings Thirteen: Counting Sheep
An uneasy story about sleep, about sheep: about shleep.
Article voiceover
Counting Sheep Getting nowhere with my insomnia, I decided to try counting sheep. Maybe the old ways are the best, I reasoned, and it could even be there’s some sense in it: sleep’s approach is heralded, from what I can remember of sleep, when the word-thoughts start to fade, and the image-thoughts start to gather. When, lying obediently with my eyes closed and my body still, a small sandstone cave with some toiletries in it, or a woman sitting in a cubicle with a baby on her knee, or an unremarkable whisk appears unbidden in my mind’s eye, I know sleep is there to be let in. So, perhaps we can invoke sleep by choosing to see visual images in our imagination. Perhaps, if we provide the visual images using our conscious mind, the unconscious mind will take the hint - just as, when sitting in a restaurant with a friend, if you ask ‘how’s your food?’ they might well offer you a taste. Sheep seem as good a thing to choose to imagine as any. I started at 1 and worked my way up, as I believe is the norm. I was imagining these sheep milling around a pasture, wandering into my field of vision. 2, 3, 4… I reached 684 sheep with no sign of nodding off. The pasture was running out of room, and I wasn’t sure what best to do to accommodate more sheep. One possibility was to ‘zoom out’ and move my perspective further away, so more of the pasture would be visible to me, making more room for more sheep. Another possibility would be to shrink the sheep I was imagining, while keeping the pasture the same size - which would have much the same effect. A third possibility was to start stacking the sheep, either by bringing in some sort of scaffolding for them to climb on, or just by getting them to clamber up each other. Yet another possibility was to allow the sheep to leave my field of vision once they were counted - although if I were to do that, then how would I be sure the new sheep I was counting weren’t sheep I had previously counted who had wondered in again? I’d have to commit the sheep’s faces to memory, and I’m not sure that’s within my capabilities. I’m not proud of it, but I struggle to tell one sheep from another. It seemed clear that the best route to take would be the one which demanded the least conscious thought. The trouble was, trying to make a decision between the routes was a conscious process - a verbal process, too, and words are the enemy of sleep. So the best decision would be a quick decision. But the urgency wasn’t helpful, and brought me to a more wakeful state, made worse by the condensation of the thought ‘the best decision would be a quick decision’ into the words ‘the best decision would be a quick decision.’ Another thought layered itself on top of the thought of those words (this superimposition was about the frustration of thinking those words, and the fact that thinking them had moved me even further away from my goal of falling asleep) and another thought on top of that (this one about the frustrations of metacognition and how dearly I’d like to stop thinking about thinking about this, morphing into a thought about how I was now thinking about thinking about thinking about this). And all the while that these thought processes were tumbling and re-tumbling, the counting was still going - up to about 720ish by this point, as sheep continued cramming themselves in. The counting was partly automatic, partly self-consciously driven by me. But as I went up (723, 724, 725) I became aware, quite softly at first, that there were other numbers going on as well, numbers in the low hundreds at this point. Curious, I thought: who could be counting other than me? The tone was low, soft, rumbling and mob-like - no, not mob-like: choral. I realised it was the sheep. The sheep were counting. Why were they counting? The thought that the flock was doing it in mimicry of me came quickly, and left as quickly as it came - because it was quickly that I realised they were counting not up, but down. ‘97, 96, 95…’ My various tracks of thought faded to one track, which coalesced around the words ‘To What Are They Counting Down?’ ‘…91,90, 89…’ The answer became clear quite swiftly - well, no, just part of the answer - the sheep began shifting and jostling and accommodating and compensating, creating the appearance of waves passing through their fluffy bodies, and ending with their heads all aimed towards one point in their midst, at the centre of the pasture. ‘…73, 72, 71…’ The sheep parted, reversed and revealed a sort-of-obelisk, erupting from the field. It was in motion, steadily rising, parting the turf as it did so; I could not help but think of birth. It was squat, though large, it was tapered, bulbous, the surface was formed of many shallow planes, with a rough smoothness to them as if they had been shaped through scraping, and above all it was unmistakably ovine - you knew that hooves had built this - many hooves, some bigger by some way than any average sheep - and you also knew that the mind, or minds, that had conceived it were of the sheep kind, too. ‘…50, 49, 48…’ The object was pulsing as it emerged, shifting between a dark grey state darker than black, and a luminous, lichenish green. Its sickly light carried some distance, painting the sheep’s faces in waves - waves that were growing quicker, becoming more frequent, more urgent. A heavy driving hum made the bones around my ears vibrate. Still the numbers counted down. ‘…35, 34, 33…’ To What Were They Counting Down? I clamped down on my thoughts to constrain a speculative answer from finding form, held those thoughts tightly so they couldn’t shift their shapes into terrifying images of prediction, lest they in some way bring those predictions into being, even as I knew in my blood that when the numbers reached their destination what would come to be was sure to be more terrible than any fate to which I could give image! ‘…28, 27, 26…’ I opened wide my eyes. I was in my bed, shelves by my side, the ceiling above me. All I could hear was the boiler in my room setting into action. I felt for the switch beside me, and turned on my lamp. There was my bedside table, there were my clothes folded on the chair, there was my door. I drank heavily from my glass of water, just as I greedily drank-in the reality of the room. I moved from my bed to the bathroom, urinated, moved to my desk and read a little, collecting myself as I did these things. When I felt I was myself enough, and when I felt distant enough from the disturbing field of my slumber, I climbed back into bed. My head heavy on the pillow, the pillow cradling my skull, I closed my eyes. ‘…25, 24, 23…’ The numbers were still being counted down, the light was still pulsing, the hum still rumbling; the pasture, the sheep, the object were still exactly as they were. I tried to open my eyes, and I felt the witnessed scene itself try to resist my leaving it, as if the image on my dreamed retinas were somehow holding on to my waking eyelids… but open them I did. I did not sleep again that night. I have slept a little since: by accident, because staying awake became too much; or on purpose, drugged by the hope that this time the ovine ceremony would not be taking place. Each time I have sleep, the numbers have still been counting down, the scene still as I have described. I have, since then, been fighting sleep. With coffee, with amphetamines. But these barricades cannot hold forever. Last time I entered, the numbers were at “…4, 3, 2…” and the green light was staining everything in sight and the taste in my mouth was metallic. My hands are trembling, and my eyelids are so heavy
Thank you for reading Wordings Thirteen,
I discovered this one in a documents folders, having completely forgotten that I’d written it; I’m still not 100% sure that I did.
Wordings Twelve to follow next week.
Take care of yourselves,
John-Luke