Sleep
Sleep as a death image - fighting with someone in your sleep as fighting with the dead, the nightmare that won't end as a form of death-in-life.
The liminal state between waking and sleeping as a form of death: the speaker trapped in recursive nighttime torment that mimics dying without release.
Appears in 6 songs
“I wake up screaming from dreaming”
Sleep as a site of torment, the speaker's nights are filled with screaming nightmares that produce the fears catalogued throughout the song, including the bridge's imagined future betrayal.
“It's 'bout to be the sleepless night you've been dreaming of”
The sleepless night operates as a paradox, a night without sleep that has been dreamed of, representing the anticipated consummation or beginning of the relationship.
“Sleepless in the onyx night”
Wakeful suffering in the dark, the inability to rest during the period of romantic isolation and failed relationships, now resolved by the opalite dawn
“If clarity's in death, then why won't this die?”
Death as the site of clarity, if death brings understanding, then the death of the relationship should have brought clarity, but it hasn't. The relationship refuses to die and therefore refuses to resolve.
“Sleep in half the day just for old times' sake”
Sleep represents the speaker's regression to her younger self when she returns home, the absence of adult responsibility and the return to childhood patterns.
“Slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long”
The sleep/dream image reveals James's duplicity, he slept with August physically but dreamt of Betty, showing he was emotionally absent from the affair. Uncle Jerry reads this as James revealing too much about himself in the dramatic monologue, exposing his inability to be faithful to either woman.