Of Sloths and Sleepwalkers

Their eyes are glassy; their arms outstretched. They enter into the kitchen at eleven on a winter morning and make themselves some tea. Though asleep, they manage to smirk and scowl at the insensitive souls who refused to make them some. As smoke rises in the air, they find themselves a biscuit and take the steep steps down to their room. It ain’t no minor miracle this: their sleepy brains and lazy feet successfully coordinate to disembark from a steep-staircase-ride and eventually jump inside a soft, pink quilt. Outside, the day ripens and the sun climbs up a few storeys. For the sloths though, the night has just begun.

It is sad that this breed of indolent sloths has taken over a perfectly tame and often, worrisome sleep disorder.

Kids, when found rising in sleep, are likely to be under stress of some sort. They fail to fall in slumber and are up and about, often working at daily tasks, while the brain is in a faraway land. It is possible that the sloths read up related literature and zeroed down on this as the silver bullet that would have all their sloth-symptoms excused.

Strange, this sleepwalking. What is even more mystifying is that the repercussions of this somnolence transcend all barriers of time, place and occasion. For instance, if you see them all alert in front of the television and request: “Won’t you see who rang the doorbell?”, they instantly droop and their eyes droop further and all they reply is a fly-like: “Zzzz”. They could have been mosquitoes in a previous birth for all we know. Say on another instance, when everyone is getting ready for an afternoon of chit-chat, they silently slide away into the comforts of the pink quilt. “I didn’t realize how and when I fell asleep!” they later complain. But of course. It doesn’t matter if the people in the chit-chat were ones they were meeting after a decade. It isn’t their fault, the poor things. They are sleepily-challenged.

When I see sleep-deprived youngsters slogging away in graveyard shifts, my heart goes out to them. They have distorted biological clocks. Like the parents whose baby is fond of midnight shrills and trills. But for the sloth-sleepwalkers, the causes of illness are unknown. Experts are divided in opinion between an adamant laziness and an elementary refusal of labour of any kind. Patients, it seems, are helpless when faced with chances of ‘work’. Their limbs freeze and mouths go dry.

On my part, I am willing to add to the research. I know several darlings afflicted with this spooky sleepwalking business. And if a cure is formulated, I would require several packets to hand out.

*picture from sleepzine.com