Childhood Bedtime is on pp. 54-55 in Poems For Your Heart
My growing up years were spent in seven different schools in two countries, all painful. Add to that a mother who hadn’t wanted a daughter and reminded me daily that I was a mistake and shouldn’t exist, and this all made bedtime a very welcome event. (I see it all now as bad karma I’d undertaken to work off during this lifetime.) Bedtime enabled me to recover from the day’s spiritual injuries.
Childhood Bedtime refers to a poem by William Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. In this Ode, Wordsworth thinks sadly of the days when everything on earth had a magic glow, a spiritually validating “celestial light”.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;–
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
Then he realizes that it’s May Day and he should cheer up and not spoil other people’s enjoyment of the festivities. He tries to match the happy spirit but in his heart he still reflects on how the glory fades as we grow up:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:”
The infant becomes a boy, then a youth, the glory fading each year, until:
“At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”
If any of this rings a bell for you, you may have childhood memories of life being magical, of birds and flowers (or shops and cars) providing a glory that faded until adulthood took over with its job responsibilities, bills, home maintenance etc. dominating your awareness. In my case, the bedtime healing experiences stopped when I was eight and we moved from Sydney to Armidale in the north of New South Wales. Our mother stayed behind nursing her second son and waiting for our house to be sold. Meanwhile, without her negativity, I was free as a bird and suddenly had two new friends. My awareness shifted to social life as we played joyfully after school, rolling with laughter down the green sloping lawns of the Teachers College where my Dad was now Assistant Principal. He was busy with his new job and my new friends, daughters of the College Principal, and I, were free to play until dusk fell and our fathers collected us for dinner.
Until age eight, those bedtime experiences floated me out of the body into a deep peace and from there I fell asleep. Being out of the body is distinct from being asleep. Sleep involves dreams that express or perhaps clear away our daytime preoccupations and fears. An out-of-body experience involves no dreams; only increased proximity to God and expanded knowledge of his love and peace.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a poet of the Romantic era that included others such as Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley. He had three brothers and a sister and their early years were lived in England’s beautiful Lake District.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth