I have been sleeping badly lately. I can't quite figure out why. Maybe it's the summer heat and humidity, the intermittent rain and steamy nights. Maybe it's worrying too much about things I can't control very well – my imperfect health, my overall existential situation, work.
Whatever the reason, I will wake up far too early in the morning, often before dawn, and struggle to continue with my night's sleep. I will gaze out the window at the pinkening eastern sky, and anti-nostalgically remember distant dawns witnessed while standing in formation in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I suspect the humidity and heat cause this inevitable mental train to depart the station.
Then I will wake up fully, end up reading something or trying to write something, and then attempt to take a nap. Some mornings, the naps work, other mornings, they don't.
This morning, as thunderstorms brewed, I successfully napped. I had strange dreams.
In one dream, I remembered a story that once made a huge impression on me. The strange thing (or the inevitable thing) was that the story I remembered, in the dream, was a story by Borges about dreaming. A man dreams another man, who grows to become real. In the end, the dreaming man is revealed to have been dreamed by another, ad infinitum. This is the "Ruinas circulares," a quite famous Borges story.
I awoke and found a link to the story text online. I re-read it, as I have done many times.
I made a resolution, which seemed to emerge from that groggy post-dream space, that this should be my epitaph:
Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche
[No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night]
[daily log: walking, 6 km]