The nourishment of sleep

Somewhere in my dreams last night there was a baby, the tiniest baby I’ve ever seen who was intermittently crying for a feed then sleeping. I went to pick up this baby to reconnect it with the mother.

Its mother reached the baby before I could get my fingers around its frame, which looked as fragile as an insect’s. Premature, I thought, but did not say. 

Elsewhere in my dream a yellow green snake coiled around my fingers and would not release its grip. I was seated at a wedding reception and a woman to one side told me to let the snake slither to the ground after which it would leave. It was not venomous, just determined, she said. Once grounded it slithered away. 

My dreams are great companions. They feed the nourishment of my sleep, but I rarely hold onto them for more than a few minutes over the course of a day. I’m untrained at getting a firmer grip on them as I once managed during my analysis. 

In those days I wrote dreams down, even in the middle of the night when I woke. To explore the next day with my analyst. Like me, Mrs Milanova took dreams seriously. They were like friends, she told me. They helped you understand your states of mind. The way they rollick along from one day to the next. 

The stuff of a human mind fascinates me. And what better subject than me, though I could hardly be called objective. And the blinkers go up the minute my fingers hit the keyboard, even as I reach for authenticity. 

Even so, that pull away from certain subjects is always there: You can’t write that. You can’t say this. You can’t alert people to this or that, or the other secret business buried in the back of your mind. 

It’s as much an enemy of art as Cyril Connolly’s ‘Pram in the hallway’ suggests, the ways in which the presence of children get blamed for taking parents, especially mothers, from their creative lives. 

Sleep for me is also a great distractor. If I did not need my sleep and dreams, I’d get up every day to write at 5.00 am. But I do not have it in me to rise earlier than 6.30 am on weekdays. And on weekends I love my mornings without an alarm. When I can lose myself in the unconsciousness of my dream world unencumbered by responsibility.

The pram in the hallway. The responsibility of motherhood. The life of a therapist. It’s a constant. And as much as I welcome it and seek it out, I sometimes wonder how it might be to live without appointments. 

I have been working ever since I was 17 years old and only once in my life beyond my university days have I been without work. This happened when I was between jobs after returning from six months in Canberra as a 24 year old where I worked part time in two separate jobs.

I remember the sensation. My husband-to-be was still working. His job with the Commonwealth’s Department of Administrative Services, conveying and selling land for the government, took us to Canberra. While I gave up my social work job at a community care centre to follow him. 

Typical. A woman following her man into a job and leaving herself without one. But as soon as we hit Canberra, I began the search. My eldest brother worked in the ACT as a senior public servant in immigration and he put me onto the head social worker at the Woden Valley Hospital. She took me on part time in the rehabilitation unit. 

I did not warm to her authoritarian style or the job, apart from one or two of the other social workers there. Mostly I wanted to go home. For the second half of my Canberra days, I snaffled a job as sole social worker at the Queanbeyan Hospital on the outskirts of the capital city. 

A weird job and place. The buildings were wooden as if built in war time. The place had an impoverished feel. And my office, tucked away in the back corridors, was isolated. 

My predecessor had been there for decades, lived in Queanbeyan, and everyone knew and loved her. The worst was at morning tea when I entered the tearoom and tried small talk with people I did not know. I was shyer then than today. 

Today I’d go out boldly and introduce myself. Today I’d have something to say. Today I’d be unashamed, but as a twenty-four-year-old who lacked confidence in her capacity at anything in a position of seniority – I was meant to run an entire department of one – I floundered.

By the time I crossed through the flat back roads of Canberra to the Woden Valley Hospital after lunch I was ready for rehabilitation and there was plenty to come. I hated the lack of autonomy. The responsibility I had to show up even as I had little idea of what I was meant to do beyond being a social worker who helped people sort out their affairs. It was not where I wanted to be. 

Come Christmas and our return to Melbourne for a week, I railed against my boss at the Woden Valley who would not let me extend my time away for more than two days because, as she put it, ‘It’s your job and responsibility’. 

She had no idea how much my heart ached for home. For the familiarity of the streets of Melbourne. The way the people I knew there conducted themselves. My friends, even my family. We did not stand on ceremony the way folks in Canberra did. In Canberra you needed an invitation to someone’s home before you could visit. You could not simply drop in as we did in Melbourne. 

I was blessed that my husband-to-be did not plug for a continuation of his time in Canberra and instead returned to his more mundane tasks at home. When I was finally free to find my own course in the place where I felt safest.