When I was little, sleep was a problem. Sleep resembled death. If I closed my eyes, would they ever open again? What if I existed only in a giant’s dream, and would vanish when he rose? Occasionally, in the wee hours, I’d wake to a silence so intense it boomed in my eardrums and shook my brain — a phenomenon known (I kid you not) as exploding-head syndrome.
As I got older, though, I forced myself to learn to sleep. Whatever the environment, I could conk out, no problem. On a futon, in a tent, in a barely reclining economy seat on a long-haul flight to the other side of the planet — all I had to do was close my eyes and shut myself down, like C-3PO in Star Wars. I sweated through mosquito-haunted nights in the Aegean, and shivered through overactive air-conditioning, huddled in a bed with strangers in Singapore. Always, I woke up rested and refreshed. Even after I had kids and became, out of necessity, a morning person, sleep was easy.
