When you can’t sleep try praying
Now I lay me down to sleep,
At the end of the day this is about not doing or having to do another thing before you fall asleep. It’s about letting go of control with the hope that a good night’s sleep will replenish your mind (with everything that the stresses of the day has taken away), will refresh it and enable you to “reboot” it to take on the next day playing with a full deck.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
Increasingly, more people believe that letting go of control risks losing control and then being out of control which risks never being able to get back in control and to the place you left off. Also, increasingly more people are having trouble trusting things to chance (or other people), believing that doing so will make their life worse. When we fall asleep we know that we have little control over where our minds and dreams and nightmares will take us. Therefore “praying for the Lord” to watch over your mind is praying that if it does fall apart, He will safely guide it to come back together.
If I shall die before I wake,
And if by chance your mind falls apart and worse, fragments (which is a fear many people with PTSD have which may explain why they sleep so poorly and startle so easily) and doesn’t come back this not only leaves you in limbo, it leaves you in a state of terror that is not tolerable or even livable.
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
If and when pain and suffering become truly unbearable and you feel as if it has no chance of getting better, most people would want to be put out of their misery. This is about not just being put out of your misery, but also praying that if you go to another place (a.k.a. Heaven) that it be a place where you no longer have to endure that pain and suffering.
