I have been buried too long under the filth of sleep. ‘Will he ever crawl out?’ you wonder. Will he ever crawl out. I have grown too comfortable at this stage of course. Much as I might despise myself for it, I have grown far too comfortable here – buried under all this filthy old sleep. Every bit of me is sleeping at this stage – my very bones are sleeping within me. You can hear them snoring if you listen carefully enough. My arms are sleeping and so are my legs. My toes are sleeping, even the eyes in my head are sleeping – apparently open as they might be. The air is heavy with it – the smell of sleep. ‘What’s that like?’ you might ask. What does sleep smell like? You could work it out for yourself, if you thought about it. It’s a type of body odour, or it’s like the smell of dirty old sweaty trainers that have never been washed. It smells like feet when you have long-standing colonies of bacteria growing between your toes. It’s like the smell of soiled underpants. It’s deeply personal and it’s not nice. It’s embarrassing, I guess you could say. ‘Will he ever crawl out from under it?’ you ask. Will he ever… The chances are against it of course. The chances are very much against it. The longer you lie asleep the harder it is to wake up. Waking up is traumatic then, you see. It’s a very profound trauma. The mind recoils from it. It recoils in absolute horror. Part of me knows that I am asleep of course and that’s why I am so disgusted with myself – because I know I’m not willing to make the effort to wake up. I want to, but I know I won’t actually do it, not ever, not in a million years, and I hate myself for that. There’s no empathy there, I suppose you could say. No empathy for myself, only horror. Horror and condemnation. How could I have become this vile thing, I ask myself, only there are no actual words. It’s too deep-down for words – no words, just this all-pervading sense of revulsion. I have submitted to this filthy state of torpor for so long. I am sickened and appalled by the knowledge of what this means, and yet I will continue to submit it to it. I will continue with this filthy sleep, loathsome though it is. I will betray myself to it. ‘Look on the bright side,’ you say, ‘you’re comfortable enough there aren’t you?’ It’s comfortable and it’s comforting and you’re pretty used to it at this stage. You are very well used to it. We like what we know after all, do we not? Everyone likes what they know; if we know it then it’s got to be halfway decent at least. If we know it then it can’t be that bad. Or at least no matter how bad it is, there is at least one redeeming factor, which is the redeeming factor of its familiarity. The redeeming factor is that we know it. There’s comfort in the familiarity of one’s own personal hell – a type of comfort, after all. ‘The comfort of sleep’, for what that’s worth! The comfort of dirty, filthy sleep, enfolding you into its arms. Welcoming you back, like an errant child who has seen the error of their ways. Although you never really left, did you?