The Wake-and-Worry period of my life has arrived in full force. Some people enter into it far younger than I. A few stay blissfully outside of its clasp and will sleep soundly every night of their lives. I guess I am somewhere in the middle.

Wake-and-Worry episodes weave together three strands of content: troubling situations one cannot affect at 3:00 a.m.; irrational snatches from one’s own dreams; and irrelevant, even mistaken, information that serves to intensify the worry.

Last night I journeyed through all three strands. I fretted about two projects that are lagging behind their deadlines (inevitable and hard to rectify at 3 a.m.). I panicked about an upcoming conference that requires travel and diligent preparation—one I had misplaced in my mind several days earlier than its actual beginning. And I entertained a host of innocuous characters spinning on a carousel from a preceding dream who transformed themselves into ruthless political assassins with me as the target. Yikes.

Wake-and-Worry sessions of ten minutes are not so bad. But as the clock ticks past the first hour and into the second, the annoyance-level rises. Limited hours of sleep are further robbed. Every passing minute makes it harder to go back to sleep. This phenomenon is likely familiar to you.

Still, Wake-and-Worry does have its interesting points. Analyzing its disparate content can be entertaining in the light of morning. The carousel-setting of my mental miasma last night surely came from preparing material for tonight’s episode of “A Night at the Opera” which is dedicated to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel (1945). True, there are no political assassins in Carousel, although a theft does turn deadly. And the single calendar item featured, proclaimed in the exuberant chorus “June is Bustin’ Out All Over,” is correct! It is definitely June and, based on the flora here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it is busting out all over.

One of Carousel’s most lauded scenes probably also played a role in last night’s nocturnal wakefulness: the balletic dream-scene that occurs when the departed Billy Bigelow is allowed to “return to earth” to affect a gesture of comfort to his now fifteen-year old daughter, left behind in difficult circumstances after his ill-fated demise. That scene alone elevates Carousel to the rank of masterwork.

Earlier in the drama, the same character Billy sings a tightly woven, touching reflection of his confused feelings after learning his young wife is expecting a baby. The boasting strains of “My Boy Bill” melt into the recognition of “What if he . . . is a girl?” Some of Richard Rodger’s sweetest music follows as Billy sings “My Little Girl.” No Puccini or Verdi could have done it better.

The opening section of Carousel definitely shaped last night’s Wake-and-Worry: the instrumental number known as “The Carousel Waltz”—a sweeping waltz that appears in multiple forms throughout the work. For me, the first strains of this waltz (slowly cranking up, as would an actual carousel) evoke vivid memories of my childhood. I’m sitting in the dining room, in front of our brand-new stereo phonograph (a substantial, oblong piece of furniture, mind you) which was kept busy playing the limited LP recordings we owned. One recording was a treasured copy of Tchaikovksy’s Swan Lake given to me by a towering Texan who had been an army buddy of my dad during World War II. Other LPs contained arias by Mario Lanza and Nelson Eddy. A few others held pieces conducted by Toscanini or top hits by Glenn Miller. And one of these albums was the score to Carousel.

My mother sang the songs of Carousel at the drop of a hat, with or without the record spinning. Consequently, as a child, I learned every note. When the star-studded movie version of Carousel was released in 1956, I was quite little. But it was about that time that momma took my older brother and me on the only train ride of my childhood up to the tenements of Brooklyn where her mother still lived. The story of that homecoming is complicated. I remember the trip only because of black-and-white photographs plus a mental image of kids playing on sidewalks, flanked by very tall apartment houses.

But in retrospect I’m pretty sure the trip was instigated at precisely that time because of my mother’s desire to see the movie version of Carousel as quickly as possible and in a grand New York City theater. Back then, it took months for movies to spread across the country. She didn’t want to wait.

Whether she took us with her to the film or not, I cannot say (although based on my outfit sitting on the train, I certainly had the kind of fancy clothes a little girl would have worn to a Manhattan theater back then). Either way, I envision myself there, next to her, wrapped in a scratchy crinoline, dangling my feet clad in shining patent leather shoes, sunken into a red velvet seat within an architecturally grand theater, as we watched, awed by the spectacle of Carousel on the magic screen.

Life is strange, is it not? Our dreams are stranger. The periods at night when we wake and worry are stranger still. It helps somewhat if the setting for our nocturnal frets can be pegged to something as beautiful as Carousel. It helps even more when one remembers, amidst tossing and turning, to say one’s prayers, particularly those child-like prayers that bring comfort and release. One also can turn to the final number of Carousel for comfort: the reprise of its central aria “When You Walk Through a Storm”—a strong, but tender song firmly established in our American musical heritage that is able to inspire hope in anyone lucky enough to hear it.