WRITINGS: Essays

LullabyMAGIC
By Julia Soto Lebentritt

The ritual is, you always had to be tucked in and kissed good night. Sometimes your mother was dying of fatigue. She could not take her body out of the living room. However, you said, “I can’t go to sleep unless you tuck me in!” That ritual has to occur. It is like magic.

The lullaby is like water running. We start to sleep because the water washes our tensions and errors away. So, we become like fish swimming deeper in the dark, darker and then we disappear, we sleep. We do not feel our bodies anymore. We disappear in the feelings. Lullaby singing makes us sleep because we have blood in our bodies, like a river running. The same kind of rhythm makes us comfortable. The lullaby singing must be only friend to friend, or lover to lover, or mother and child. If mother sings the lullaby to unknown people, they think what a funny voice. When a child is six years old if he sleeps in his mother’s arms, he will grow and mature having beautiful sensitive feelings.

Sleep relaxes the muscles and mind. What is happening when we go to sleep is magic—changing consciousness at will. It is going into another state of consciousness and how you get there. If you close your eyes in a dark room, you see tiny dots of color—red ones and blue ones. Watching these swimming colors going up and down behind your eyes can put you to sleep. Either a visual pattern or an aural pattern can get us out of our mundane existence into something else. Maybe we think the colors are stars before us, stars inside our eyes that create a sort of cosmic unity.

We can compare the magician and the lullaby singer:

The Magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat; the Lullaby Singer can sing about a golden butterfly, and it appears.

The Magician commands complete attention; the Lullaby Singer commands sleep.

The Magician hypnotizes the audience; the Lullaby Singer puts audiences to sleep.

The Magician can disappear in thin air; the Lullaby Singer disappears after putting us to sleep.

The Magician can perform amazing feats like escaping chains, and walking across fire; the Lullaby Singer can bring peace when baby’s crying is like war.

The Magician recites magic formulas made of nonsense syllables such as abracadabra, hocus pocus, known worldwide to perform tricks; the Lullaby Singer chants magic nonsense formulas such as hums and drones known worldwide as lullabies in order to shift us to sleep.

The Magician often wears black, silver stars, and shimmering moons; the Lullaby Singer wearing pastel nighties and flowered underwear sings about silver stars and shimmering moons.

The Magician delights us producing treasures; the Lullaby Singer delights giving us treasured dreams.

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