How so, that sleep undoes a tangled knot,
and through darkness invents a grand design?
What has sleep that my woken mind has not?
From where dawns its brilliance, its clever shine?
I imagine, or do at least suspect
(for nothing more than thought can be my proof)
that there must be a time, a time unchecked,
when uprises sleep to begin its spoof;
through a short-list of yesterday’s wonders,
unsolved, given up to further thinking;
given up to logic’s bin of blunders,
for night to make right in just a blinking.
. How so that sleep outwits my woken mind?
. It lets go the bits that by day do grind.

© Tim Grace, 17 September 2011

To the reader: Sleep, far from an unconscious passage through darkened hours, is an active agent of the night. In sleep-mode, we switch our attention to sifting and sorting through snippets of past experience. In the ‘dark room’ (from an endless supply of stock) we develop our post-production sequences into lucid and surreal dreams. Hours of sleep provide space for re-interpretation of time and place; unrestricted by the physical constraints of a woken mind.

To the poet: In writing this sonnet I wanted to create a sense of one-being in two-minds; pondering a perplexity. The over-riding order is a sequence of questions tentatively answered without confidence or surety; deliberately vague and suggestive of possibility. Speaking to yourself through a third-party narrator is a dream-like experience – sleep uncouples and derails the midnight express; the train is off its tracks.

woken mind