Ella Dawn McGeoughBaby, from the series Dream~form, 2020, installation view, Gales Gallery of York University, Toronto, 2021.
Photo: Colin Miner, courtesy of the artist

My-brain-at-3am

Ella Dawn McGeough

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There are those who can sleep and those who cannot. For the sleepers, theirs is a world where sleep comes easily, without question or crisis, a physiological guarantee. As a child, I slept. As an adult, I have not. In 2019, reading Anne Carson’s poem “Ode to Sleep” (2005) — in which she asks readers to imagine their lives “without that slab of outlaw time punctuating every pillow” — I became aware that I had lived half my life with sleep, half with doubt; half with rest, half distress. Eighteen years with, eighteen years without.¹ 1 - Anne Carson, “Ode to Sleep,” in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2006), 41.

It was mid-summer when sleep first escaped, while commuting to the city for art school — my mind raw from the flush of new ideas and recently revealed family traumas. That sore heat. My mother’s perpetual snores.

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