This is the sleep of the deserving.
The mind, upon sinking, reviews a catalogue of experiences. Sense is made of events as consciousness struggles for its last breaths at the surface of this calm mental pool and then, when a grasp of the temporal is lost, the subconscious rises from its prison. A prison made by the iron of a man's chronic wakefulness.
Sleep -- so elusive. Easy with its embrace, swimmingly heavy. An dim empty canvas arrives; empty only for what seems like a moment before things change.
Instinct will describe familiarity. This is the past, perhaps -- a memory -- but not the past alone. Even before the whispering of sands makes itself recognizable, he understands that the linear concept of time is too simplistic a description for this. Time has no place here, but all places in time are present and tangible. A grand color introduces itself next, in the same way that comfort is introduced to the needy; it is like reassurance, stretching vastly in all directions. Above, below, to one side and the other. It is sun-glow on a desert he knows.
His awareness is invested not in what he sees, because he cannot yet see in the midst of these hazy introductions, but in what he feels and hears first. These two senses were his primaries -- the information they collected carried his perception each and every day in regular life. And here in this irregular space, they are met with something they do not expect. It is not the anticipated shifting of sand under boot-heels, this being a presumption his mind is quick to project based on the setting. No, this is a solid resonance because the surface beneath him is like glass -- like a field. Each time his soles make contact with this surface, vibration without a shred of noise shudders through him with a surreal impact. It confuses the senses for an eternity of walking --
-- until that eternity has passed like an eye-blink.
With that eye-blink, shadows and haze are gone as if they never were. The desert is below him, stretching on. In one direction, it runs itself into the sparkling depths of a blue ocean; in another, it loses its color to the mighty thrust of a mountain range painted in dusky shadows and white toothy peaks; in still another direction, its pale fingers reach delicately into the green of a plain where water runs; all of this is home. All of it is home and none of it is flat, but dramatically curved space. Even the cyan sky is steeply curved, with clouds seeming great and heavy overhead but thinning and stretching the farther they are from here. He is at once an infant, a young man, an old man, a dead man, the versions of himself reaching serpentine from one side of him to another. A life in pointillism, this: when he seeks to look closely upon one version or another, that self disperses like particles in a beam of light and only some vague shape remains. The phenomenon captivates him. It seems poignantly similar to attempts made to remember a childhood memory or to visualize the future -- there is only a gritty perception and the rest is seemingly immaterial, mere imagination.
When he looks down now to behold the desert below -- he finds himself walking in it. Here is the priceless sound of millions of grains of sand moving under the weight of his passage, dragging at his boots. He labors in the shadows of a dune's hulking shoulder and when he crests its sharp ridge and descends the other side, he sinks into sloped boot-heels engineered for the art of keeping a tall man steady on such changeable landscapes. A hot wind rifles dark linen against his face and his gloved hand comes up to pull shrouds low on his brow. Keenly aware that heat exists but does not punish as the real desert should, he pauses in his trek and looks up.
Glorious nothingness. Pale, this desert; hostile, beautiful and remarkably silent. The only sounds here are the whispers of linen at his ear and tiny collisions of shell, bone, glass made near his thigh: the beaded fringe of a russet sash slung beneath his belt. It means something among the tribes -- the color, the beads. Familiar, normal, and so very very realistic; all of this. He breathes it in with the air.
Except something is coming; someone else is here. Words seem like thoughts, but the man is speaking aloud regardless and -- to whom? "Look at that -- not a book in sight."