Hey there, and welcome to the Chicago Sun-Times guided meditation for sleep. I’m your host, Neil Steinberg, and I’d like to invite you to get comfortable in a secure location. If you are driving your car, reading this on your phone at a stoplight, as people actually do, you are invited to ease your car over to the side of the road, angle your seat back, and hold the phone a comfortable four inches from your face.
Or better yet, set this to MurmurMode, where one of 12 artificial voices will narrate this for you: Unemployed Hunky Actor, Older Lady Librarian, Whispering Mermaid, and such. Then you may place your hand over a flat surface, gently open your fingers, and execute a maneuver known as “setting your phone down.” If you are experiencing the residual frozen claw that comes from holding an iPhone for 110 minutes straight, try wiggling your fingers until the numbness and tingling dissipate. Do not be alarmed by your hand being empty — your phone is still nearby and available. Give it a gentle pat to reassure yourself that it’s still right there.
Now sit back and close your eyes. Draw in a deep breath, filling your lungs with air. Hold that, savoring the quality of fullness. Then exhale the air out, preventing yourself from wondering how you’ve come to such a degraded state that you need to be told to breathe, an activity heretofore done automatically and without guidance, by you and most living creatures. Worms breathe unaided — through their skin, a process called cutaneous respiration.
Now set an intentionality — what sort of sleep would you like to experience? The serene snuggling sleep of an infant nestled in a completely empty crib, devoid of bumpers, blankets or stuffed animals, because apparently those are considered lethal nowadays? The bivalve bliss of the ocean oyster, resting in the warm sand of an antediluvian sea? The restorative slumber of someone who didn’t spend the past 40 years madly dashing like a gerbil on a wheel in a profession that was steadily dying all around him? The choice is yours.
Identify something that happened today and be grateful about it. Is your skin pale enough that you could go to the Home Depot for a box of nails without worrying that ICE would grab you out of the parking lot and send you to a nameless prison in El Salvador? Do you live in a city where the mayor is not trying to balance the budget on the backs of those businesses that stay despite his constant death-of-a-thousand-cuts harassment? Focus on this good thing while crossing your hands over your chest, executing the butterfly hug while repeating, “I am grateful. I am snug. I am protected.”
While we are utilizing the my-wishes-become-reality linkage between flitting intangible thoughts within and the generally harsh and unresponsive reality without, a charmed notion that Oprah years ago somehow convinced us was real, feel free to add: “I live in a functional democracy, where laws apply equally to smirking billionaires and nugatory losers such as me.” Reach for the stars.
Gentle yourself toward sleep by telling yourself: “I am tired because I worked all day in a fishery deboning halibut fillets, standing in a 38-degree room, pulling out pin bones with needle nose pliers. My body is fatigued from crawling through a field, picking strawberries in the hot sun. My muscles ache from sliding 80-pound bags of cement off a truck onto a loading dock, as opposed to what I actually did — logged onto my work computer then spent most of my time surfing TikTok, buying stuff online and imagining the coworkers who might come by and gossip if we weren’t all parked on our sofas, isolated at our own homes.”
Now focus on the background music, a sort of electronic whale song, punctuated by various bloops and simulated gull cries. Try not to wonder where they get such music from — web sites like Meditation Sound and ZenMix, offering an endless stream of royalty-free cricket chirps with titles like “Wistful Return” and “Drift Off.” Because really, this is all about stiff-arming reality long enough so you can pass out, not about looking too closely at the pap you’re being spooned.
You are not alone. A third of Americans have problems with sleep. External reality does not exist. Your daily tarantella of disappointment and anxiety is not real. You are tall, thin and good-looking, with adequate health insurance that isn’t like a second job to actually use. You will awaken refreshed, revivified, and ready to happily roll that even heavier boulder up an ever steeper hill. Happy trails. Pleasant dreams. Namaste.