The Funny Thing About Insomnia

And yes, by “funny,” I mean excruciatingly irritating.

You would think that – after someone spends several days with little sleep at night and reaches the point where she can’t finish a sentence and her brain is mushy enough to be mistaken for cottage cheese – well, you would think she would easily fall asleep the instant she falls back into bed.

You would think that. 

You might think that if you’ve never experienced the joys of insomnia firsthand.  If you don’t understand how it works.  If you think that logic enters into it. 

But the truth is that in sleep, as with many things in life, there are no guarantees.  There is no “supposed to.”  Should does not equal could.  You take what you get and roll with it.  That’s what you do.  I know other people worry for me and I appreciate it.  I keep looking for that surefire solution and I’ll keep a diligent lookout for it for as long as it takes.  But I roll with it.

Meanwhile, I memorize a lot of interesting things while trying to dull myself to sleep.  May come in useful someday. 

See?  Benefits. 

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Foods to Help You Sleep…

I don’t know if these work.  Yet. 

I plan to try some of them.  Why not?  It’s just food.  I’ve tried other food.  I’ve tried milk (now they say milk to help you sleep is a myth….grrrrr…).  I tried Melatonin when the Dr. who conducted Sweetie and my pre-marriage counseling lectured me about taking prescription sleep aids.  She told me to try Melatonin.  I tried it.  Didn’t help.  Actually seemed to make my insomnia worse.  I’ve tried other methods.  I’m game to try new things out.

My current experiment?  Sesame seeds.  It’s on the list.  Supposed to be loaded with tryptophan.  Sure, I’ll try that.  It may take a while before I can figure out if they help or not.  I can’t easily correlate one good night of sleep with any one solution.  Except prescription sleep aids (Nahnah nah nahhhh to you Dr. Counselor!).  So, I’ll try and track sleep progress with sesame seeds and without.  Who knows.  Can’t hurt.  Sure, I’m skeptical (goes well with my cynical nature), but I’m not closed-minded.  I mean – almonds as stress relievers?  Who wouldn’t be skeptical of that??

Everyone has a theory.  I work in an office full of insomniacs and everyone has a different theory.  I’m telling you – if someone really had a natural solution to insomnia and could bottle it – they’d be gajillionaires.  Someday I’ll figure out something mass-producible.

Happy dreaming!

Link in case you didn’t click above:  http://www.naturalhealthontheweb.com/sleep/snacks.html

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Good thing insomniacs don’t get lonely. Too much.

The dark quiet hours of the night.  The hazy wasteland of a bright morning.  I see nighttime through the fractured lense of an ocassional insomniac. 

People sleep when I stir.  I doze as others awaken. 

Even the online world is quiet at my normal midnight.  My loved ones certainly are.

Nothing quite so disconcerting as to wake from a short sleep to the vague sensation that the world doesn’t need you.  The late night conversations flow, perhaps thankful of my absence.  The tired sleep, oblivious to my wanderings.  I think of people I wish I could talk to – the ones who will talk.  And who I miss talking to.  But the world is dark.  The night is still.  And I am awake.  Sleep-deprived e-mailing should be avoided as much as drunk calling.  What would one say without the barriers of logical thought and alert restraint?

The dark of night has exclusive hold on feelings and sensations the daylight can vanquish.  A short hall is a halting obstacle course of pointed edges and flitting shadows.  A loneliness born of half dreams and a mind left defenseless by an exhaustion too complete for mere sleep.

You are who you are.  I am who I am.  We do what we do. 

What I feel is real.  Just over-heightened perhaps.  Maybe a little too raw to explain. Maybe a little too sharp to remove from the sheath of quiet expectations and full-rested patience.  It isn’t for most.  And the exceptions are never awake anyway.  It’s enough to make you want to run to the moon.  If I wasn’t so tired, maybe I would.

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Thanks a lot brain

So, after finally falling asleep around 4 a.m. last night, here are the images that woke me up every half hour or so until 7:30:

People sitting around. I realize that there are people talking, I walk around and see that they have no bodies. They are basically heads in boxes sitting on chairs talking. I was thinking “They can’t be alive can they? Can you live without a body?!” They were alive, but miserable because, hey, they have no bodies. That one woke me up.

I’m hiding out in an apartment and trying to peek out the blinds. There are death squads outside – basically people who are hunting down the folks in the apartments and killing them. I’m trying to peek without letting them see me, but I moved the blinds too much and it caught the eye of someone outside.

Now I’m hiding in an almost-deserted part of a burned out town. There are odd doors and big pieces of wood stacked up and other people are trying to hide behind anything that is big enough. But, since hiding places are scarce, any time you find one, you run the risk of being killed by another person trying to hide. Again, I’m awake.

I’m at the back end of a huge industrial-like garage. I need to get out of there. But there are a line of swinging columns in front of me, with only a tiny walkway between each. I realize that the swinging columns are actually long streams of molten metal and, if I get too close, the heat will burn me. There are a bunch of people in front of me, and I try to avoid them, but I end up bumping a guy in a suit with briefcase. He goes flying backward, drops his briefcase and may have fallen into the blazing metal (not sure). His fall momentarily stopped the moving columns and I made a dash for the door. Yup – that dream woke me up also.

I’m trying to walk around but realize there are hidden cameras all over the place. I don’t want anyone to realize that I just escaped into these hallways, but I’m not stealthy enough. I end up looking right at the camera, which is a dead giveaway that I don’t belong there.

I’m at a gas station and suddenly, someone starts jumping around, slashing people left and right. He’s jumping around a lot, so I figure he must be a mutant frogman (don’t ask me how). I jump in the car with someone else and we try and leave, along with other cars. The frogman shoots out his frog tongue and picks up another car and flings it in the air. We speed off down the street, but the frog guy is zipping after us, throwing out his tongue, which can cut a person in half if it catches you.

hmm…maybe that’s how those people lost all their body parts. And with that…..I wake up for good.

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