John Steinbeck's "The Winter of Our Discontent"

One of my favourite passages is the start of Chapter 3 where he describes two patterns of sleep:

My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr. For a moment her temperature leaps up so that I can feel the glow of it beside me in the bed, then drops and she has gone away. I don't know where. She says she does not dream. She must, of course. That simply means her dreams do not trouble her, or trouble her so much that she forgets them before awakening. She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her. I wish it were so with me. I gith off slepp, at the same time craving it. ...

On the other hand, I know in my bones and my tissue that I will one day, soon or late, stop living and so I fight against sleep, and beseech it, even try to trick it into coming. My moment of sleep is a great wrench, an agony. I know this because I have awakened at this second still feeling the crushing blow. And once in sleep, I have a very busy time. My dreams are the problems of gthe day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.

We love to build categories and place ourselves in them, but I think we all fit into both of the above. We are a little of everything, only we like to pretend to be one thing as a show of pride or to fool ourselves. In fact, we don't know ourselves, so we are more than we think we are and only discover what we are when friends tell us or a book like this points it out. I like that. We learn about ourselves in the mirror of literature. At least we learn aspects of ourselves. We learn what masks we wear as we dance wearing the horns of animals. We learn how sleep steals us away gently and leaves us with a kitten's purr.