Mattresses, comforters, soft downy pillows: all are exquisite aids for the nightly passage into oblivion. Everyone uses them - walk into any bedroom in America and see the nearly identical layouts. Simply sink into the fabric and drift off despite the remaining brainwaves that clamor for attention, your colleagues in the daily scramble. In the familiar comfort of your bed, you may finally be free to rest well, be prepared to rise again and plow through another day.
This is how it goes, life as usual, until the night when you wake with a start and feel inexplicably uncomfortable. Staring blankly up at the ceiling, you wonder as to the cause of your emotions. Is it the heat? No, you have the same blanket you always use in the summer. Is it the mattress? No, that’s fine too. Slowly the ceiling comes into focus, pale gray shaded by night, and the plane of it seems closer than you remember. Didn’t the room use to be bigger? The longer you stare, the closer it seems, and the odd feeling you woke with solidifies into claustrophobia. 
Throw back the covers, pad softly to the door (you had no idea you could move so silently), lift the latch, inch it open. The night air that trickles in sends a chill down your spine, but not because of the temperature. It smells of freedom. The concrete is cold, but this only serves to energize the sole of your leading foot. Away from the house now, you couldn’t feel more alive or alert. Even as you concentrate just on the rise and fall of your chest, your eyes and ears are hyper-sensitized, taking in everything: the dark heads of the trees, the warm glow of the streetlamp against the side of the house, the feeling in your nose that reminds you of shadows on stone. You are the master of this slumbering world. The longer you stand, the more you are aware of. How could you not have noticed before the metronome of the crickets? The curious presence of the dark?
Time bearing no meaning, at some point you feel the urge to look up. Given the light pollution of civilization the stars are not bright, but the longer you crane your head backwards, the better you can pick them out.
Eventually your neck gets sore - you aren’t completely invincible - but the sky is not finished with you. The obvious conclusion is to stretch out on the ground. You experience a moment of self-consciousness (remnant of your daytime preoccupations) before reconnecting with reality. You are alone. The nerves in your skin, too, are wide awake. The textures of your surroundings enter your awareness more quickly than usual, so you are well acquainted with the exact feel of the ground along your entire body within a matter of seconds. It occurs to you that one couldn’t possibly take in this much sensory information normally - it would overload the consciousness, crush you with the sheer magnitude of details.
Just like the air, thoughts flow freer outside. Perspective is so clear when the night is your advisor. Questions of Why, left hanging on our metaphysical message machines in our regular lives, seem to generate answers by themselves out here.
As suddenly as you realized, those dark eons ago when you woke, that you felt trapped, you now crave the warmth of your bed. Those soft pillows and blankets should be the perfect cure for the chill you now notice has crept into your bones from lying on the ground.You stand up, and, turning back to the house with certainty, purpose, you retrace your steps to the bedroom. Smoothing out the blankets, your heels forming symmetric indentations in the mattress that no longer feels unbearable against your skin, you fall into a silent sleep while the sky and crickets wonder who will be next.