The Wonder Called Sleep

Introduction

Hello Learners, today we will be exploring the short story “The Wonder Called Sleep”, which is the seventh chapter of the textbook English Supplementary Reader A Pact with the Sun. A story doesn’t always need to be set in a world which doesn’t look like ours. Sometimes the stories can come directly from us and our experiences. Sleeping is a universal human experience.

This tutorial talks about the importance of sleep. It also tries to look at the concept of dreams. We will look at a poem in the end as well.

Story Summary

This is a story that talks about sleep. Sleep is one of the most fundamental activities of human life. When we work throughout the day our body gets fatigued and to get out of this fatigue we need rest. We get this rest in the form of sleep. Both our mind and body get refreshed after a good night’s sleep. Sleep reduces our blood pressure and body temperature. It also reduces and calms our heartbeat.

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While sleeping we often dream; however, we don’t always end up remembering our dreams.

• Dream essentially is an activity that your mind does while you are asleep.

• Dreams often don’t let us realize noises and disturbances.

• Dreams may be helpful to understand some of the troubles that we are going through but dreams don’t tell you the future.

It is important to understand our dreams, there are a few people who maintain a dream journal to go back to some of their dreams.

The chapter also includes two stanzas of a poem called “Lights Out” by Edward Thomas. We can observe that the poet has encapsulated the idea of sleep in a beautiful capsule of poetry. The imagery in the poem is beautiful. It is fascinating how words can create such beautiful patterns and a narrative through the same. The poet compares sleep to the unfathomable deep forest. A forest where people can’t see a way, an experience where the person has no choice.

However, the whole experience as the poet acknowledges happens in an unknown space. Thus, going back to the activity of the mind and soul. It is really interesting how the entire chapter is structured. It starts with the idea of sleep itself. It helps you to correlate your own personal lived experience to the chapter and then it ends beautifully with a poem that tells you about someone else’s idea of sleep. It then leaves you with a question see what is the idea of other people’s sleep and whether are people getting good and peaceful sleep or not.

FAQs

Q1: What is the most obvious advantage of sleep?

Ans: The most obvious advantage of sleep is to help your mind and body to get out of the state of fatigue. It helps you to rest and cools down your system. Without sleep, your body will not function properly. It reduces your blood pressure and calms down your heart rate. It also improves your day-to-day functioning. As they say, early to bed and early to rise to make a human healthy, wealthy and wise.

Q2: What happens to our bodies when we sleep?

Ans: Our body goes into a state of relaxation. Through our sleep, every bit of our body relaxes. Our heartbeat drops. Our Blood pressure stabilizes and we also attain a sense of peace and calm. It calms our mind and body. Our muscles and organs also relax through sleep. We sometimes get dreams and these dreams also happen during our sleep. Dreams are nothing but activities done by our minds during sleep.

Q3: Define a dream in your own words.

Ans: A dream is a pattern of multiple things which we see in our day-to-day lives. These patterns tell us something concerning our own lives. It is full of darkness but also has multiple images which signify something in our daily routine. For a few people, it might feel like being in a short film, for others, it might be an aspect of self-participation in the whole experience. There is a motivational quote that says “dreams are not what you see during your sleep, but dreams are something that doesn’t let you sleep”, it’s a nice quote.

Q4: Why are dreams important? Mention two reasons.

Ans: Dreams are important because -

• They tell us a lot about what we might be going through, emotionally and spiritually. The images which we see in the darkness are created by the references that our mind collects throughout our life.

• They help us to avoid noise and other disturbances while we are asleep. We can often notice that people’s sleep breaks when they hear sounds. Dreams act as a security shield against that because it makes your mind busy with images in the darkness. That’s why dreams are extremely important.

Q5: Why has sleep been called a wonder?

Ans: Sleep has a very beautiful and mystical quality. It is a moment where you end up being yourself but at the same time, you experience patterns that might not be very probable in your real life. It is a part of your imagination and it is in itself a very important message which is being sent to you while your mind is doing the activity during your sleep time. This complex nature of something very simple makes the idea of sleep a wonder. We can even think of things that a person cannot live without and we will find that sleep is definitely on the list.

Q6: What is a “lullaby”?

Ans: We have often heard of songs that our mothers and grandmothers used to sing to make us fall asleep. The calm, peaceful, lyrical and melodious nature of the sound made us fall into sleep quickly. Sometimes we heard stories through these lullabies as well. In different languages and cultures, there are different lullabies present which can still widely be noticed and this activity is a part of the culture in general.