11:14 a.m. - 2003-09-08
Insomnia
I had yet another sleepless night last night. This is becoming a normal occurrence.
I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I drink warm milk before I go upstairs. I take a warm bath, and then I lay down and read the most boring book imaginable. Currently this book is "In the Devil's Snare", a book about the Salem Witchcraft Trials. You would think this book would be fascinating, particularly as I have ancestors who were, shall we say, intimately involved with the whole affair. It's not, though, it's a snoozer. Trust me.
So I read for awhile with just a soft reading light on, and then I turn off the light and listen to quiet music for awhile. And by then Bruce has usually come upstairs and we turn off the night light and he goes to sleep.
And I proceed to lay awake until about 3 am.
The first hour I have some hope. I do breathing exercises and think relaxing thoughts about playful bunnies gamboling in happy fields of clover. This quickly degenerates into worrying about all the abused animals of the world. From there, it careens over to all the abused people in the world. At that point it's a short hop and skip to all the people who have been personally jerky to me.
I go through this litany of all the people I want to strangle at the present moment, right back to all the people I wanted to strangle when I was two years old. Last night I spent a good half hour thinking about Mrs. Crouch, my second grade teacher. We called her "Mrs. Grouch", for good reason.
This is all very strange, because as goofy as it sounds, I have for years practiced a form of meditation where I try to love everyone, even if they are personally distasteful to me. I have, on occasion, even tried to love my mother-in-law! So it's weird to me that every night I go through this wacky emotional roller coaster despite the fact that during the day I'm able, much of the time, to be a compassionate and forgiving human being.
I suppose it's the frustration of not being able to sleep that does this to me. Lying awake while Bruce is snoozing next to me brings out my inner she-devil from Hell.
This insomnia is not without a context, though. When I was a child, right up till I was in my early twenties, I only slept about four hours a night. This was partially because I was (and still am) terrified of the dark. However, I realised after I left my parent's haunted house that I was still only sleeping four hours a night, whether I felt safe or not. And I never had any problem with being tired the next day. It was just my natural state of being.
When I got to be about twenty five,though, it all changed. My epilepsy got out of control, and in particular I had sleep seizures. These, in combination with a couple of other neurological sleep disorders, ensured that I never really got a good night's sleep. Consequently I was always exhausted, and "slept" all the time.
When my seizures were treated a few years later, the exhaution went away, and I was treated to a few years of blissful eight hours a night sleeping. I'd fall into bed at night, headed for Dreamland, and in the morning I would rise at a reasonable hour, refreshed, if a tad cranky.
Sigh. The pendulum swings back I guess. Not to get too personal, but I have suspected for a couple of years that I'm about to head into that big change that all women go through. Yeah, you know, that big change that makes it possible to have wild sexual flings without the constraints of birth control!! Unfortunately one of the symptoms of that change is, of course, insomnia.
I recently met a little old lady who told me she only sleeps three hours a night. She stays up crocheting blankets for the local hospitals neo-natal critical care unit. What I have to look forward to!!
If I had any sense, I would get out of bed and go downstairs for a dose of Glenfiddich. I'm sure that would make me sleep just fine!! However, I promised my mother when I was 16 that I would never use alcohol as a sleep aid. "That's the way alcoholics are made!!" she sternly warned me.
It's advice that has stood me in good stead over the years. I may be an insomniac, but I'm not an alcoholic.
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