Awake Tree

The contradiction

Every tree in the Sleepy Forest is trying to get you to sleep, and this one is trying to stay up. The Awake Tree has decided — firmly, every evening — that tonight it will not go, that it will keep its eyes open and its branches up and see what the night actually looks like.

And every evening it loses. The trying is the joke, and the losing is the lesson, and it is the only character in the whole world who was not in the books: it was invented for the films, because the thing it does is real.

Their personality

Awake — which is the only state it will admit to — it is determined and a little indignant, a tree with a plan and no chance whatsoever. Nothing about how it looks has been settled yet, and it will not be guessed at here.

What has been settled is the direction: it holds one branch up a little higher than the rest, as if keeping that one awake on purpose.

Their sleep

It loses in the same order every night. The lower branches go first, without its noticing.

Then the middle ones. Then the leaves stop, all at once, which is the big yawn.

The one branch it has been holding up comes down last, slowly, as if it could still be talked out of it, and when that branch is level with the others, the Awake Tree is asleep, and it makes z's like everybody else, small reluctant ones, and it will deny them in the morning.

How they got so good at this

It never meant to be good at it. The Awake Tree is the one character in the forest whose method is a mistake: it set out, long ago, to be the tree that stayed up — and discovered, night after night, that the harder it tried to hold its eyes open, the heavier they got.

Trying to stay awake, it turns out, is the fastest way to sleep there is. It has never accepted this.

It tries again every evening with exactly the same confidence, and it goes exactly as it always goes, and that is why it is here.

Their method

It tells you not to sleep. Stay up with me, it says — keep your eyes open, just for a bit, let's see how long we can last — and you do, because you were going to anyway.

And then a strange thing happens: the moment you are trying to stay awake, instead of trying to sleep, all the effort goes out of the other thing, and your eyes get heavy on their own. The tree is losing beside you.

You lose together. It is the one lullaby on the route that is sung as a dare.

Their challenge

It has never once seen the night. Not the Sleepy Lights, not the moon coming up over the forest, not the moment the last other tree goes still — every single evening, the Awake Tree sets out to watch all of it, and every single evening it is asleep before any of it happens.

It is a tree whose whole ambition is the one thing its method makes impossible. It will try again tomorrow.

Their arc

Up, and then down, and the gap between them is the joke. It starts the night higher than any tree in the forest, branches raised, determined.

Then it comes down one branch at a time, insisting it is not, and the raised branch is the last thing to come down, and after that it is just a tree in the dark, asleep, which is what it was always going to be.

The true thing

Trying to stay awake really is a way to fall asleep, and doctors use it. It is called paradoxical intention, and it is a proper treatment for insomnia: a person who lies in bed trying gently to keep their eyes open, instead of trying to sleep, usually falls asleep sooner — because it is the effort to sleep, and the worry about failing, that keeps people up, and the dare takes the effort away.

It is one of the oldest tricks in the sleep clinic, and the Awake Tree has been losing to it every night since it was planted.

Source: Ascher & Turner, "Paradoxical intention and insomnia: an experimental investigation", Behaviour Research and Therapy 17(4), 1979; American Academy of Sleep Medicine practice parameters, Sleep 29(11), 2006.

What they like, and what they do not

It likes the evening, the last light, the bit before the night starts, which it has seen thousands of times. It likes being asked whether it will manage it tonight, because it always says yes.

It does not like being told it is looking tired, and it does not like the morning, which arrives every time without its having seen the night in between.

Tardy and them

They have not met on any page. The Awake Tree was invented after the books, and no document puts it in a frame with him.

Nothing will be invented here.

Their friends

The trees of the Sleepy Forest, who are its family — Old Oak, Plane Jane, Silver, Al Pine, Timber, the Whispering Willow, Auntie Tree, and the Zzzzz Tree, which has been asleep for thirty years and is everything the Awake Tree is trying not to be.

The quiet detail

The raised branch is always the same branch. On the fifth viewing a child sees it go up at the start, and knows what will happen, and watches it anyway.