Underneath me, Sam Grest - who'd been my friend and saved my life - lay perfectly still and slipped further and further into the final sleep of an unfair and horrible death.
We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.
To do anything to a high level it has to be total obsession. Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything. I respect all forms of movement and lifestyles, but I am in a bubble. I wake up, it is in my head; I go to sleep, it's in my head, 247.
Gospel ministers should not only be like dials on watches, or mile-stones upon the road, but like clocks and larums, to sound the alarm to sinners. Aaron wore bells as well as pomegranates, and the prophets were commanded to lift up their voice like a trumpet. A sleeping sentinel may be the loss of the city.
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
I'm lucky, I can sleep from takeoff until we land; so I'm fresh, rested and ready to work on arrival.
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 hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great, Under the canopies of costly state, And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?
What is it like to fall asleep? What happens? Where do we go? Why don't we remember? Since childhood most of us have wondered about the mystery of sleep.
I have nothing against the North Koreans but this Kim Jong Un has got a screw loose. A member of his cabinet, his security minister, nods off, falls sleep. We've all done it. Kim Jong Un takes the guy out and has him executed, just for just falling asleep. Oh, and he was also deflating footballs.
For many years I wrote nothing but "I will not sleep with Steve Almond" over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would.
To take estrogen or not to take estrogen: That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to abstain and suffer The sweat and puddles of outrageous flashes Or to take arms against a sea of mood swings, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; at first the studies say 'twill end The heart attacks and thousand bouts of bloat That flesh is heir to, 'tis a true confusion - For then they say 'twill cause us all to die Perchance from breast cancer; ay, there's the rub; For who can dream or even sleep while worrying about What doctors might be saying come next week?
You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience.
I think the most challenging aspect was keeping up the degree of physical fitness you need while filming a major leading role in a primetime U. S. series. You have very little time to sleep and eat, let alone train.
If science can eliminate sleep, we will have more time to live and no time for the dreams. But living is superior to the dream because it is real!
So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.
Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.
Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eye's to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.
I am preparing myself for death. When I go to sleep, I try to keep myself smiling. So that when I die, I have a smile on my lips. I want an electric cremation. I don't want any poems or fuss after that. And for heaven's sake, don't bring back my ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh.
Tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let's say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he's held as long as he can remember. Soon, perhaps, he will decide it's time to let that secret out. What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community. But it also depends on us -- on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.
I didn't want to go to sleep knowing I would just wake up in the morning.
