SLEEPING ON BOARD
Written by Alberto Coretti
Falling asleep is your sign, your signal that both body and mind have found a state of perfect harmony with the boat, and with the ocean.
We commit our unconscious, and most importantly our sleep, to the ocean.
Setting sail into the horizon is not a decision to be made lightly. It doesn’t matter how big the boat is. A boat is a confined space, a hortus conclusus with limits and rules, which, once you’re out at sea, you must obey. In one sense, leaving means saying goodbye to the freedom that we take for granted when we’re on land. Because when we’re on board, we must share our space, our time, our supplies with the rest of the crew. But the prize is the vast expanse of blue that lies ahead, the nighttime skies that fill with stars we didn’t even know existed. And above all, when the wind fills the sails and powers the vessel forwards, the inexplicable feeling of being truly connected with the breath of the planet.
As well as a bag of possessions, we bring not only the rational, active parts of ourselves, the part that makes logical decisions, but the emotional part too. And we commit our unconscious, and most importantly our sleep, to the ocean. A silent agreement of reciprocity is made: when I’m awake I take care of the boat, and when I’m asleep it’s the boat that takes care of me.
During long crossings, when endless days and nights roll into one without even a glimpse of land in the distance, our own rhythms are defined by the rising and setting of the sun. Life on board is consistently marked out by watchmen day and night, and we take it in turns to keep guard as the rest of the crew rests.
Against this profound revolution of our everyday rhythms, we seek comfort and shelter in the embracing curves of our mother ship: we lay down on the belly of the hull, and without realising it, we fall into a deep sleep and return to the forgotten familiarity of those first nine months of our lives. It’s as if over the centuries, the sea has gradually shaped the lines of each boat, each ship, purposefully keeping the assonance between maritime and motherhood alive.
Back in the days of great sailing ships
Back in the days of great sailing ships, sleeping “a murata”, i.e. on the decks along the sides of the vessel, would enable some of the crew to get some rest beneath the welcome embrace of a blanket, but still be immediately available if their assistance was required. Now that boats are designed more like houses, it’s more usual for crew members to seek their shut-eye in the refuge of a bed in the middle of a master cabin, disturbed by frequent squeaks, smells, or the swaying of the ship. And yet only a few metres away, lying on the berths out on deck, any interruption to the stillness simply becomes part of the sonic universe with which the ship so graciously comforts us.
For a few centuries, sailors sought slumber in hammocks below deck: a sort of cloak in which to wrap themselves up and give in to sleep. And they had Christopher Columbus to thank. Upon seeing how the hammock was used by the indigenous people of the Bahamas, he reinvented it as the perfect bed, giving sailors a calm, comfortable place in which to relax, suspended from the ground where mice, insects and vermin would often reside. Shortly after the discovery of America, rigid wooden berths were abandoned in favour if this new way of sleeping, and in 1597, the British Navy began building ships that were specially designed to accommodate hammocks, neatly hung 30 cm from each other in the crew quarters.
Until the middle of the last century,
when bunks were invented, every sailor had their own hammock. Once their watch was over, they would stumble below deck and fix their hammock onto the ceiling to finally get some sleep. Swaying against the
movement of the ship, the hammock was, and is, the best refuge for anyone who suffers from sea sickness.
Hammocks were also the “vessel” used to transport sailors from the earthly world to the spiritual world: before being committed to the ocean, corpses would be stitched up inside the canvas by their shipmates, with the last stitch going through the nose to make sure that life had definitely, and definitively, left the body.
However, sleeping at sea is sometimes synonymous with sleep deprivation, at least for solitary sailors without an automatic rudder, or for unfortunate crews plagued with injury and sea sickness. Being constrained to the helm for days, simultaneously steering the boat and your consciousness, sometimes implores you to retreat within: it’s an unbearable condition, an impossible task. You reach a state of half-sleep, half-awake, where the confines between dream and reality become blurred and hallucinations take hold.
But extreme cases aside, falling asleep is your sign, your signal that both body and mind have found a state of perfect harmony with the boat, and with the ocean.
