The Terror of the Night
Every so often, I have a bad night’s sleep. The trouble is not so much getting to sleep as it is waking up in the dreaded witching hour. In the latest instalment of that, I remember having to lie with an acute sense of dread about perceived problems at work that, in the light of day, turned out not to be problems at all.
As I went through that experience, a part of me was thinking that this was the adulting version of a kid who was afraid to go to sleep for fear of the monsters that would emerge from the closet or under their bed. In my adulting version, the monster was the fear of the forecasted (and non-existent) work matter hanging over my head.
I think my mind went in this direction because I had a few years back written an article for Humanum Review about the anime series Monster. In that article, I dedicated a segment on the etymology of the term “Monster” which has bearing on this latest experience with (interrupted sleep):
Typically, when we think of monstrosity, we think of physical deformity, beings that are so hideous in appearance that they cause us to turn away in fear. But there is a subtler type of hideousness, not related to physical form, but to time. To understand this temporal dimension of monstrosity, we need to attend to the etymological dimension of the word “monster.”
In Latin, the root word for the noun “monstrum” is the verb “monere,” which means “to warn.” In this definition, the locus of monstrosity is not in the physical present, but in a temporal future, such that what magnifies the terror of the monster is the person’s being left alone with no sense of the dangers that lie lurking before them beyond those concocted by their unguarded imagination. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of any tangible connection to the present and to others that is the source of the monstrosity. The monster is that anonymous and threatening future that hurtles itself towards the lonely, isolated individual who has no one to rely upon for support or to verify that the threat even exists.
In short, what I experienced that night was a monstrosity insofar as it was a warning of an impending (and eventually non-existent) threat.
Thankfully, I was not alone in thinking through the travails that threaten our slumber and the vulnerability that ensues. My friend at the Centre for Public Christianity (I had the pleasure of working with CPX’s Justine Toh here, and here), Dr Natasha Moore, had written a beautiful and personal reflection on ABC Religion & Ethics concerning what one is to do when one finds sleep hard to come by. The piece spoke of classic prayers dedicated to sleep, and even more classic psalms to remind us of the God who hems us in while we sleep. In Moore’s words:
Pain, crisis, fear, all have a way of swallowing up everything else in the world. 4am has a way of cancelling out everything good or bright. We need something big enough to swallow 4am, to contain those moments of weeping, watching, wearying, working in the night and keep them from growing monstrous beyond their bounds.
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