Soul Chronicles: Standing Watch in the Sleepless Sea
Segment 6 in our series Soul Chronicles for the Chronically Ill
by Shaler McClure Wright
You’re listening to episode six of Soul Chronicles, offering a soulful perspective on how to navigate the unique challenges of living with ongoing health conditions. Special thanks to Health Story Collaborative for hosting this monthly audio column. My name is Shaler McClure Wright and I’m a writer/artist living with Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome.
Standing Watch in the Sleepless Sea
Being awake at night when the world is asleep is like standing watch on a ship at sea. After a few hours of staring into the distance, you might feel isolated, fearful and uncertain if you will ever dock in a safe harbor again.
Worries loom larger in the silence of darkness, just as rocks seem to rise out of nowhere. And once-familiar objects are shrouded in strange, threatening silhouettes. Many of us with chronic health conditions have sailed on the sleepless sea, and quite a few of us are frequent passengers.
I’ve been bunkmates with insomnia for decades. When I was in my 20s and 30s it was easy to shake off a sleepless night and function pretty well the next day. But now it takes a toll, and I’m learning to treat sleeplessness with new respect, as both a worthy adversary and instructive companion.
Being alone and awake in the night can be frightening. Nocturnal impressions are heightened. Even when we’re old enough to put aside our childhood fears of monsters under the bed, insomnia can feel like a giant presence, smothering you with unstoppable, oppressive force.
But it’s also true that the mystical aspects of darkness can serve as a gateway for visualization, opening us to new and unexpected points of view. And there’s a better chance of quieting our worries if we choose to walk through that gate without preconception or fear of where it might lead.
Here’s what I mean. These days, when I wake up in the wee hours (envious of my husband’s purring-ly deep sleep), I direct my attention away from the fuzzy shadows and inward to my imagination. Then I choose to visualize a different experience of the dark, from another time. I like to choose events that have held space in my memory, but may not yet be fully understood. Most recently I chose to revisit my memories of midnight from a specific perspective— at sea…
Just after I graduated from college (a long time ago) I was invited to live and work with a family on a sailboat, as we voyaged from Finland to Sicily. During longer passages we followed a system called watch ‘n watch, which means round-the-clock sailing—four hours-on, four-off—with our crew split evenly between shifts. I remember how my crewmate would wake me for the midnight-to-four [shift], whispering as she gently rocked my shoulder, “Polaris is bright and winds are steady. But there’s ground fog, so you’ll be in the bow, on lookout.”
Lookout was my favorite job, especially in the mystical hours after midnight. I loved to feel the cool dampness of night against my knuckles and cheeks as I scanned the horizon for buoys and bells.
But not every watch is idyllic. In foul weather, sound is distorted by ground fog. All appears quiet until something pops—all of a sudden—out of the darkness. At first it’s hard to tell how far away that something is, and your emotions can run the gamut from startled to fearful to attentive.
It’s only in the attentive phase you can accurately make out shadows in the dark. Flotsam and jetsam float by without harm, and passing ships appear farther away than they actually are. Sound is muffled by moisture until it’s upon you. Most nights the sounds of the sea are soothing, but in foul weather, there are sounds that can rattle your soul.
On one particular stormy night, as we were exiting the English channel and rounding the isle of Ushant to seek shelter in Brittany, we had a force ten gale that was blowing us sideways. Our bow was caught under breaking wave after breaking wave, and our foredeck was awash with the weather. The storm was too fierce for anyone to stand in the bow, so I stayed amidship, fastening myself to the guardrail for safety.
We made little headway during that storm, even with shortened sails and use of our auxiliary engine. Our 57 foot sailboat didn’t have radar, so our biggest worry was about inadvertently finding ourselves in the path of a monster tanker, too large and immobile to slow down.
The English Channel is a busy shipping lane with freight crossing at all hours. We could hear the tankers but couldn’t see them, and it was my job to sound our air horn once every minute to make sure they could hear us. We could feel their wakes, still rolling underneath us, and we held our breath, hoping we’d never come close enough to to get sucked in by their propellers.
Luckily, our horn was heard and that night the tankers passed at a safe distance. But it felt like forever before we could rest. Finally, in the wee hours of that sleepless night we made entry in the nearest port. But it was a commercial harbor, and it was full. We had no choice in the darkness but to raft our pretty white sailboat to a rusty old reddish tanker that was ten times our size. And for all we knew, it could’ve been one of the tankers that crossed our path in the channel, but now its immense steel hull was providing shelter to our windward side.
That stormy night reminds me of my worst nights of insomnia. With no sense of how much time had passed, no sense of where I was, and no sense of what lay ahead, I felt small and powerless. The overwhelming size of the tankers felt a lot like the overwhelming force of insomnia, and their churning wakes felt a lot like the tossing and turning of a sleepless night.
That storm taught me many valuable lessons. And one, unbeknownst to me until now, is worth repeating: Try to remain open to what frightens you; for the very thing you fear may become your protector, given time.
Just as a tanker can change from danger to protector, imagine the experience of transforming sleeplessness into dreamfulness. For in our dreams and imagination, the desperation of insomnia can be transformed into an opportunity for self discovery.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Nobel prize-winning poet from Spain, describes the pivot point between desperation and discovery in his poem, “Oceans”:
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...
—Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
On that night of the storm I feared our boat would be struck by a ‘great thing’. But instead, the ‘great thing’ that posed such a threat in the channel, changed its position and rested quietly, in a new place, where we would encounter it once again, from a new perspective. The final gift of that storm was coming into port, casting our lines and making fast in the dark, only to discover by daylight that we had tied up in the lee of the same tanker that could’ve sunk us at sea.
In its worst expression, insomnia can feel like a force ten gale blowing between our sheets. And after we’ve been swamped under the crests of its breaking waves, the potential insights to be gained at the bow of our ship of sleeplessness may feel out of reach. But over time, if we stay present, I suggest we can trust the afterstorm to settle. And if we’re lucky, we may even find ourselves basking in the guiding light of the North Star, Polaris, as we make way, with a yawn, for safety and peace.
So when you’re faced with sleeplessness, try to remain open to what frightens you; for the very thing you fear may become your protector, given time.
Go here for more episodes of our Soul Chronicles series.
Shaler McClure Wright is fascinated with the mysteries of creative process, the healing power of creativity, and the creative synthesis of method acting, intuitive learning and depth psychology. A graduate of Wesleyan University and The Actors Studio, Shaler has worked as an actor, writer and educator for more than 40 years, and lives in southeastern Connecticut with her husband and son.