by Christopher Schlegel

Sleepytown is a small town near the edge of reality. Here’s a question: What is on the ‘other side’ of the edge of reality. The answer is: nothing. Here’s another question: Which side of the edge is Sleepytown on? The answer is that it is on this side of reality because if it were on the other side it wouldn’t exist. And it does exist. What is the ‘edge of reality’ anyway? This is usually just a clever way of dramatizing a setting in a story so that the author may write what he or she pleases without worrying about troubling matters of cause and effect. Of course, most people go along with this because it is after all ‘only a book/movie/etc. and therefore fiction’. Much harder is the task of setting a story in a somewhat unrealistic place but still maintaining a self-consistent logic.

Please don’t misunderstand: everything in Sleepytown happens for a reason. Although there are no ‘loose ends’, you might have to dig the reason out of an enormous pile of meandering trivialities. Other times the reason is obvious and easy to notice. The only two tools necessary to unravel and understand the personalities and events one might encounter in Sleepytown are: your intelligent observation and, more crucial, your honesty with yourself.

My mother introduced me to Sleepytown when I was a small child. She would tell me it was time to go to bed around eight o’clock in the evening (nine o’clock one night a week so that I could have the special privilege of staying up to watch ‘Hawaii Five-O’). If I wasn’t tired I would tell her I didn’t want to go to sleep yet. She would always reply that I didn’t have to go to sleep, but I did have to lie in bed. I could read or play with toys or whatever as long as I was in the bed. Once in bed it never took long for sleep to take over. Usually after a good long day of vigorous childhood fun and scampering I was quite ready for eight o’clock to roll around. My mother would then tuck me, unresisting, into bed and tell me it was time to go to Sleepytown. It never sounded sinister and I was never afraid of going. My mother was a very benevolent person and there was no reason for me to think she would willingly let me go somewhere I might get harmed. So the place always seemed rather benign to me even if it was at times whimsical, confusing or downright inexplicably baffling.

When we sleep we are in our physically most vulnerable position. When we are young we don’t even think of the fact that our parents, older siblings or guardians watch over us; sometimes literally, other times indirectly through a safe house or locked doors and bolted windows. When we are older we take for granted sleeping with our spouses or lovers. But, think! While asleep we are unconscious! Completely unprotected from potential harm. To sleep with someone is a display of one of two possibilities: the greatest trust or the most stupid negligence. The presence, or lack of, intelligence and benevolence of the sleeper and the sleepee will decide which potential is actualized.

Even as a grown man I still visit Sleepytown. I usually find it interestingly amusing and at times even charming. I rarely take it very seriously. However, lately I have begun to wonder about that assumption. It could never take the place of being awake. But perhaps it has a more useful function than I have yet been willing to admit to myself.

So, after a long, hard day filled with productiveness I came home wrapped in the sturdy folds of my sense of daily achievement. I looked forward to a tasty meal with my spouse, some good after dinner coffee and conversation. Finally, I turned out the last light, kissed my spouse and told her it was time to go to Sleepytown.