Nature's Soft Nurse

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common larum bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafing clamor in the slippery clouds
That with the hurly death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And, in the calmest and most stillest night,
WIth all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

- Henry IV part II, Act 3, Scene 1, 4-31


I love nothing more so than a sound night's sleep. Thursday night Patch, affrighted by a bad dream, awoke us at 1:30, a recurring nightmare (which recurred a half-hour later), and I was up. It might be psychological, it might be physical based in my biochemistry, but I knew I'd be up. I tossed and turned for forty-five minutes, then went downstairs to the couch. There I had the patience for only thirty minutes' tossing. Then I went down another flight to the basement, to the writing office, and surfed the web for three hours. Back upstairs to the couch and - wouldn't ya know it? - I fell asleep twenty minutes before the wife gets up and into the shower.

Add to that six hours sleep the previous night, five hours the two nights before that, and, well, I am at wit's end. Though I be not a king, I sympathize greatly with Henry's abovementioned plight. You could have a kingdom and a million pounds, and despise it all without good night sleep. Converse holds true, too: the sleep of my daughters - free of visions of ghosts and vampires, that is - brings home ever so true the value of nature's soft nurse.

Lots of sleep in my forecast for this holiday weekend. And I wish plenty for you, too.