Colm O'Regan: Watching a child falling asleep is a bit like watching a sunset

Roger Kenny Photography Actor Head Shots www.rogerkenny.ie

Your sleeping children. Such a sight. Honestly. They’re the only people you can really stare at while sleeping without it being weird. Even your partner, if they woke up and saw your massive face looking at them would be asking “WHAT? WHAT DID I DO?”

A child won’t wake up any time soon. You could be binge watching that cherub. But you don’t. You have to go and tidy up the looks-like-a-burglary in the sitting-room.

But back to the faces. Softly lit by the light from their anti-monster lamp. People might scoff but there have been no monster attacks since they’ve had a light on. And we’ve never slept in that room so we can’t be sure it doesn’t have monsters in it.

They’re so dramatic when asleep. Their little bodies sprawled, draped around duvets like the background characters in one of those Renaissance paintings about Greek mythology with a violent title like ‘The Absolute Battering of Achilles With A Hurley’. Albeit wearing fluffy unicorn pyjamas. It’s the sleep of someone having uncomplicated dreams. A child’s dreams are just slight twists on reality. [What we were doing last week] + [A character from a book or show]+[“And I was being chased”].

They haven’t done any exams, made a fool of themselves in front of a crush. They haven’t worked so are not worried about what they said to a boss fourteen years ago. They don’t eat ‘late cheese’ so there won’t be any dreams featuring a world-ending flood.

The children have been in another room since they were six months old, so it’s been a while since we’ve actually looked at them for a long time sleeping. We see them in the car mirror or dip in before going to bed to congratulate ourselves on another day keeping them out of jail. But there’s been no longitudinal study.

But last week we were in a hotel. In the Executive Family Room. It sounds like a suite the Roys would rent in Succession for a confab on destroying another family member. In this case, it meant a slightly bigger room with a sofa-bed in it. There was nowhere to go so we were treated to the full story of how they sleep.

Watching a child falling asleep is a bit like watching a sunset. You’ll quite often miss the exact moment it occurs and then you’ll look and oh! They’re gone. And that’s when their hidden Other Life started.

I didn’t realise my youngest appears to be going on a Quest in her sleep until I watched her for a few hours. 

She sits up, eyes closed making a popplackalaplop sound as she tastes the air with her mouth. Then she mutters orders, perhaps to an elven army. “No I don’t want that. Bring me more”

Then she goes and lies down on top of her sister who yelps like a small seal.

This happens about once an hour, each time subsiding in a sort of judo hold of her sibling until eventually the eldest gets sick of being body-slammed and blunders like a giant moth over to our bed where she fills the space between us and flails at me repeatedly.

And the delicate little snores out of them. Like a vole would snore. Not the sound I make, the sound of someone killing a zombie The Correct Way.

Eventually, we must all have fallen asleep because the next thing I hear is them waking up like a clock alarm tuned to the news. Stored up words pouring out of them.

But sleep-deprived or not, it was nice to see their night-time selves for a while. And even nicer the following night when they were back in their own room.