Alex lay in bed staring at the black ceiling as he had numerous nights before. Usually, he scurried around the house finishing as many self-imposed chores as possible until he fell into bed and passed out from exhaustion. Sometimes he preferred to watch movies into the wee hours of the night. He drifted off to sleep with the television flickering throughout the remainder of the morning, only to be jolted back into consciousness by his blaring alarm. Everything he had been told and all the articles he had read agreed that his nighttime rituals were among the worst ways to end the day. Despite experts’ proclamations that a dark quiet room is most conducive to a good night’s rest, Alex found it to be quite the opposite. His mind was too busy. His thoughts raced all over the place but they inevitably returned to one subject. Death.

He knew precisely how this started. Those damn nightly prayers. Like all good Christian boys, Alex diligently said his prayers each night. They were a bit long and freeform and they consisted of the usual fare. “God bless mommy and daddy and my brothers and our dog,” he began. Then, he clumsily segued into pleas for good grades on school assignments or appeals for the hottest new toy for the next birthday or Christmas.

His friend Quinton probably thought he was helping Alex when he taught him the special prayer he knew. “No, no, you can’t just make it up as you go,” Quint explained. “You have to use a real prayer like they do in church. Here’s the one I say: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

What sick fuck came up with this prayer for children to say before going to bed? “If I should die before I wake” is a lot to put on a nine-year-old before telling him to skip off to Dreamland with the Sandman.

Alex was not comforted by the recitation taught by his friend. He did not fall asleep believing that he was safe and forgiven and – should anything go wrong – he will wake up in a beautiful, heavenly place amongst the clouds. No. Each attempt to get through this demented rhyme ended the same way: cold sweats, panic attacks, and sleepless nights.

Alex’s morbid mind posed the questions that a good Christian didn’t dare ask. “What if I died before I woke?” he thought. “Well, I guess I will go to heaven. But … what if…” He paused. “What if there is no heaven?”

That was only the beginning. This notion gave birth to dozens of subsequent questions and a train of thought that was best derailed. “What would that be like? What is death like? I guess it’s a lot like sleeping … but forever and you never wake up … and you don’t dream. So, I suppose there’s no thinking. Nothing is going on. It’s like total blackness. I wonder if I could lie here and not think and see what death is like? Okay, go!”
The little boy squinted eyes closed tightly to block out all light and tried to quiet his mind. He lay there silently for several minutes.

“I guess it’s like this. Wait, I’m thinking again.”

He continued in vain to wrestle with the concept of a total lack of consciousness. Unable to tackle that goal, Alex’s imagination switched to something more comprehensible. “What happens to me when I die? What happens to my body?” He began visualizing himself in a claustrophobic box six feet deep in the ground. Then, as time passed and life moved on, the body decomposed. Flesh melted away from bone. The bones collapsed and eventually broke down into dust. The coffin disintegrated. Time would continue along without him. How many exciting things would he miss out on?

Not surprisingly, Alex found himself in bed with his eyes wide open, looking frantically around the room. His heart drummed inside of his chest. His breathing grew shallow and rapid. He felt disembodied, as though he were floating. He barely controlled the desire to jump up and run screaming into the dark Georgia night. He wasn’t sure where he was running to or what he was running from; he just knew that he had to escape that feeling.

He never got out of bed for fear of his parents reaction. “Why aren’t you in bed, young man?!? You’re being ridiculous. Now go back to your bedroom and go to sleep. You’re not going to get out of going to school tomorrow just because you’re tired. I have to go to work tried every damn day!”

Eventually, the panic attack would subside … it always did. Perhaps it was a parasympathetic rebound from the adrenaline rush or sheer exhaustion from insufficient sleep over the past week. Regardless of the reason, Alex was simply grateful for a few hours of unconscious respite from the torments of his own mind.

Despite the devastating effect this twisted little chant had on him, Alex persisted in reciting it night after night. He was desperate to incorporate it into his bedtime routine. After all, Quinton was a much better person … a much better Christian … bet he never questioned his faith … and he had a real prayer.

In time, Alex drifted away from Quinton’s prayer. He resorted to his old method of praying for a while. By the time he graduated from high school, Alex quit praying altogether. Nevertheless, the damage was already done. Years of learned behavior resulted in associating both sleep and god with trauma. To him, sleep was now the equivalent of practicing for death. He wanted to enjoy life as much as he could while on this earth and he didn’t want to waste one extra minute asleep.

Alex quit attending church services during the spring semester of his sophomore year at UGA. That term he enrolled in Contemporary Moral Issues to fulfill a credit requirement for his degree program. Somewhere around midterm, he came to the realization that he could be a moral person without being a religious person. God himself was no match for equal parts Descartes, Nietzsche, and anxiety.

During his high school and college days, he had another valuable realization. Studying had proven to be useful both as a means to exemplary grades and as a diversion from nightly panic. He wrote papers, read books, and quizzed himself until fatigue overtook him. Upon graduation, however, the sleepless nights and morbid curiosities returned. He tried reading himself to sleep, but quickly ran out of authors who could hold his attention long enough to stave off the fears. That’s about the time that Alex began to fall asleep on his living room couch while watching TV, waking once the insipid infomercials took over the airwaves. As perky hosts tried to sell him handy kitchen gadgets or weight-loss products, Alex clumsily fumbled with the remote until he landed on the Power button. He staggered back to the bedroom and crawled under his comforter often failing to make it into the sheets.

Such was the progression of Alex’s lack of faith and lack of sleep.
Embittered, an adult Alex refused to pray and refused to attend church. Whenever others invited him to worship services, he politely declined the offer. All the while thinking, “I don’t need to sit in uncomfortable seats, endure bad music, watch PowerPoint presentations, and listen to someone tell me for an hour what a bad person I am. If I wanted that, I’m pretty sure that Human Resources offers a motivational seminar that will provide all of those things. Then, at least, I would get paid for my time.”

Alex eventually became another nondescript employee in a bland office at an unremarkable company. He dragged into work tired every weekday and consumed cup after cup of coffee in his Spencer’s mug that featured the retro illustration of a 1950s businessman saying “Coffee! You can sleep when you’re dead.” It was good for a laugh at meetings, but no one was aware of how accurate it was.