HomeInsomiac
Or, the trouble with sleep
Sleep has been difficult, recently. It’s been difficult for a while.
I’m not quite sure exactly, what’s been wrong. There’s been a bit of upheaval in my life lately, but it started before that. It started back in April or May or so. I started to have trouble sleeping, and moreover it always fell—falls—into a very particular pattern. I go to bed at a sensible time (about ten, say). I then wake up between midnight and one, convinced it is already morning, and have trouble getting back to sleep. I then wake up a second time around four, and have trouble getting back to sleep again. Sometimes I then wake between five and six and just give up at that point. If I really had trouble at four, my alarm will catch me in deep sleep and I’ll feel awful for the rest of the day.
Why does it happen, though? Why always at those times, every night, and why can I not get back to sleep again. One issue with the latter is the temptation to pick up my phone, to type out whatever is going round and round in my head or see who else is similarly troubled. When I do that, when my brain switches on the mode for assembling thoughts into concepts and words into sentences, I’m always going to struggle to turn it off again. Especially as, the first time I wake up in the night, I always seem to wake feeling it must be almost alarm time, that dawn is only just around the corner, even if in reality I’ve only been asleep an hour or two.
I’m not sure. Maybe I do have lots of problems bubbling away in my head, but the problems change, the ground shifts, but I still keep waking at those same times. Wherever I happen to be sleeping, whatever time I went to bed, I still keep waking at those same times. And I wish it woudl stop, that one night I would sleep right through rather than waking and worrying and wondering how to fix whatever is on my mind.
Still, one day, I’ll manage to at least partly put the world to rights, one way or another. And then, I’ll be able to sleep.