The One About Sleep Forts

When I was at our home in Lincolnshire, I used to sleep walk. Proper sleep walk. I’ve done it once since those times but only there, on the death of a friend.

I used to build what our mother called sleep forts. I would take all the chairs in the house and blockade the doors and barricade us in. Then I would build a fort under the dining table. Mum said that she could come down and the whole house was rearranged. No memory of it. None. Mum says I was fast asleep on my feet, and never disrupted me, but I was on my feet with a purpose. Which I suppose is why they call it sleepwalking and I was probably about 6 to maybe 14 at that stage. Then I would go to sleep on the second stair by the front door. My head against the wall. That step creaks to this day.

You mustn’t wake sleepwalkers, or people having nightmares because you are disrupting a process that needs to play itself out. You can attend, but it needs to run the course. I don’t sleep walk at all now and have no idea who the sleep forts were for. Sleep itself would be a gift. But I know now what I was doing: creating my own home. A place of safety.

Life sometimes feels like a continuous succession of sleep forts. I have created mine.