When our three children were little, we found that we could get them to sleep in the car, so we spent a lot of time there. On Friday nights, we would line them up in their three car seats and go on a date. We’d drive to the nearest Asian food outlet. By the time we’d done the thirty miles, they had nodded off. We bought noodles and parked outside a café where we could look in through the window and imagine we were part of an adult world. Then we got a takeaway coffee and drove to a spot where we could overlook the Hume Highway and tell each other escape stories. Before long, we checked the little ones in the rearview mirror and got talking about them, wishing they would grow up but still be little.

Once we got as far as the coast, where we met a family from Western Australia who lived in a rough and ready mobile home. They spent their lives doing laps of the continent, crawling from beach to beach, picking up odd jobs to cover the basics. The twins in that family had just turned ten.

“We never set out to be wanderers,” explained the mother. “I guess it just happened.”

“It didn’t just happen,” said the dad. “Nothing just happens.”

You meet philosophers everywhere.

The mother explained that when their twins were little, the only place they could get them to sleep was in the car. So they started doing longer and longer trips, switching off driving so that one would drive while the other got some shut-eye in the passenger seat.

Over time, this had become a lifestyle. Ten years later, they were still driving around. They had done countless thousand miles.

“We’ve been back to Perth a few times, but I can’t sleep at home anymore,” said Dad. “So we’ve rented the house. That’s how we pay the bills. We teach the kids ourselves. If they need to know about something, we drive there. It’s better than looking it up on the Net.”

About that time, a Cambodian woman turned up in town with her two sons. It appeared that some kind of arrangement had been brokered with one of the older bachelors in town, and suddenly these three people arrived looking as though they had landed on another planet, unable to understand ordinary English let alone the granite dialect used in our district. The newcomers spent a lot of time indoors. The mother found work on a chicken farm an hour away packing the eggs laid by battery hens, bringing home cartons of chipped ones that could be eaten but not sold. She started at 5:00 AM and had to leave home in the early hours to get there. The stepfather took little interest in the boys; as a matter of fact, he didn’t take much interest in anything and locals were surprised that he had heard of Cambodia let alone managed to recruit a partner from there. Each day, the elder boy caught the bus over to the local high school where there was no kind of support for someone in his predicament. The poor kid was spending most of the day sitting in the corridor. When the bus returned in the afternoon, his eyes would be fixed straight in front, his head turned to stone. The younger boy seemed to cope better; he was still at an age where you can catch a language a bit like catching a cold.

Their neighbor Tony was appalled by the older boy’s suffering and decided to do something. He did some research and discovered that a school in Canberra had a program for students who struggled with English. But there was no bus to get there. So Tony organized a car pool, approaching various people who went to the city for work. At the time, I was doing some work at the university, so a couple of afternoons a week I’d pick up the young man in our old red car with a clock on the dashboard that had died at 1:30 AM ages before. The boy greeted me with a curt nod, pulled his seat belt around himself like a zen master pulling on a robe and, within one hundred meters, was fast asleep, sitting perfectly upright. He never moved for the whole journey, his head grazing the low roof of the car. When we got home an hour later, the dashboard clock said it was still 1:30. Time had stood still, just like in the fairy tales. The boy always woke at the same point as we came into town. He said good-bye with a small nod and disappeared into the stepfather’s house. Tony explained that the young man had spent time in a monastery when he was a boy and his disciplined posture was a legacy of this. But the ability to use sleep to control reality was a skill he had developed all on his own. I wondered what kind of trauma his refugee experience brought with it.

At the end of the year, his mother appeared in our driveway with two cartons of eggs.

“I thank you,” she said solemnly. “I thank you for my boy.”

None of those eggs were chipped.

Three years later, the boy was studying architecture at a university in another state. He was a different character now, all because Tony went out of his way to make sure there were cars for him to sleep in.

As much as it is true that trauma can disrupt sleep, there are circumstances in which certain trauma can induce excessive sleep, almost as though the mind were closing down to protect itself. I thought this was happening to the boy. It can certainly happen to prisoners. There have been stories in the media of asylum seekers, who have been held indefinitely in off-shore detention centers by the Australian government, sleeping for fifteen hours a day, an image of hopelessness and despair. There is a fascinating documentary called Chasing Asylum made by filmmaker Eva Orner. It uses footage that has been surreptitiously obtained from these off-shore processing centers on Manus Island and Nauru; many of the characters need to remain anonymous. The film shows people with nothing to do but sleep. They sleep to the point of self-extinction.

I once met a Chinese priest, Archbishop Dominic Tang, who had spent twenty-two years in jail (in my opinion, for no good reason), much of it in solitary confinement. He was less that five feet tall and exuded a deep gentleness, but he was made of tough stuff. When asked how he’d coped, he said he put himself onto the monastic regime he’d learned as a novice so that he would have a different task, usually spiritual, to perform every hour or half hour. He made a structure for his day. He washed and shaved slowly, deliberately, consciously.

“Otherwise sleep too much,” he said in broken English.