I was reading when I had to stop and think about what I’d just read. Oh, it wasn’t anything important, not one of the issues of the day or the eternal questions, just a silly thing, really. In the story, a mother read her child to sleep. It’s a common thing, for sure, but suddenly, it struck me as all wrong. By reading to children until they fall asleep, it makes sense that it would give them a love of stories and perhaps help them develop the habit of reading, but just as often, wouldn’t it tell youngsters that books are boring? That they are a soporific, not an intrinsic part of one’s day?
My parents didn’t read us to sleep, but I do remember my mother reading to me once when I was sick. (“The Land of Counterpane” from A Child’s Garden of Verses.) I’m sure she read to us at other times, just as I read to my younger siblings, but it was never at night. I realize one example does not prove a point, but I am a reader and my parents never read me to sleep. Coincidence? Who knows.
On the other hand, but still on the subject of reading to sleep (which is what I do, come to think of it — read myself to sleep — but then, I also read myself awake, read while I eat, read while I wait, read while I think), I wonder if that learned tendency to fall asleep when reading is why so many books promise to keep you awake all night or at least until you finish the book. (I also wonder how that sales technique works with insomniacs since so many find reading an effective sleep aid.) The truth probably has to do with the plethora of boring books. I tend to fall asleep even in a bright afternoon if the book is boring enough. So saying that a book will keep you awake is just another way of saying that the book isn’t boring. But boring is in the eyes — and mind — of the reader; one person’s thriller is another person’s yawner.
It’s funny, now that I think about it, that such an intellectual activity as reading has become so intrinsically entwined with both falling asleep and not falling asleep. I wonder why that is. Maybe I need to add that query to the list of eternal questions, such as the meaning of life, if the dead still exist, and where consciousness came from.
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What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?
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