insomnia again?

5 am...if I fell asleep right this moment, I could get two hours of sleep before I had to get up and get to work. Two hours is enough to go on. Then get up at seven and spend an hour warming up with coffee before another session of disembodied conversations and surreptitious dashes to the bathroom. My work, such as it is...and, at a stretch, I could sneak an extra half-hour on top of that and only use half the usual time to get up to speed.

5 am...but who am I kidding? It's too late now. I know from long experience that I will suddenly get really tired in the next few hours, but the margin of safe sleep has long passed; should I achieve unconsciousness from this point onward, it will be a death-knell for any hope of having a decent experience at 8 in the morning, when I need to be awake and alert. I'm better off staying up and toughing it out than trying for a quick nap, which will undoubtedly turn into an exhausted stone-slumber with an unbearable hangover-like grogginess and irritation afterwards, when I must rise.

I was doing so well. I was halfway to a normal existence; going to sleep at a reasonable hour, after brushing my teeth, and rising early with coffee to meet the Monday-thru-Friday working day. Leave out the part where my work is only part-time, low-paying, and doesn't involve leaving the house; talking about such details will only decrease any deserved empathy with the other working stiffs of the world who put in 8+ hours, with commute time and dress codes on top. May as well not mention that the tooth-brushing part is a last-ditch effort to save whatever is left of my dental hygiene, long-neglected and paying the price.


Nope, I just had to nap today and spoil it all. After weeks of cultivating the early-to-bed, early-to-rise plan, I followed a slight case of sleeping in on Saturday morning with a slightly later get-up on Sunday...and complicating the situation was a general reluctance to get to bed at a decent hour on Sunday night, plus one particular decent hour that daylight-savings time had screwed me out of.

So be it...but it's no wonder that I was a little groggier than usual on Monday morning. Something that I'm sure most working stiffs can understand; few people greet the first working day of the week with wholehearted enthusiasm, not even those that have minimal lingering effects from whatever their idle weekend pursuits consist of.

But when early evening rolled around, with a full belly from dinner, I got that urge to close my eyes for a few. Usually I'd ignore it, just tough out the growing sleepiness for a few more hours until I could head to bed early and nodding-off-exhausted, just like I've been doing so successfully for the last several weeks. But Monday night was different- I was really sleepy already, and it was still early, after all...the usual rationalization now with added punch, that an hour or so of early sleep would not hurt my ultimate bedtime, it would in fact help me- by getting rid of the edge of that nagging exhaustion and letting me get good real sleep instead of just passing out from heavy fatigue later.

So I slept, and hard but not long as they say. I was awake from my nap by, oh, 8 pm or thereabouts. Not bad, eh? A few hours of evening to spend not fighting fatigue for once, and then to bed for the real good-night's sleep. Except that midnight rolled around, and I was still wide-eyed...and then 1 am, and then 2 am. I figured, okay, so I sleep a little less tonight...the nap was still good for me, and with a nice four or five hours of good sleep, I'll still be in decent shape for the day...especially with some coffee.

But when I went to bed, I was just not tired enough. Maybe I'm a little too used to passing out as soon as my head hits the pillow...all I did was toss and turn, no real problem getting comfortable and no annoying sounds or distractions, but no luck drifting off. My mind wasn't exactly racing, just bouncing along at its usual conscious rate. For a while I imagined a long and intricate neo-classical guitar solo, following the triplets and arpeggios up and down the neck with blazing speed and flawless musicality . Then I found myself silently debating marijuana legalization with surprising eloquence and vehemence (perhaps I would have been able to sleep with a few bong hits in me? Ah, but those days are now gone...) but the mental conversation failed to dissipate into the usual dreamy fragments and half-forgotten semi-conscious tangents that characterize the last thoughts before full sleep is achieved.

Still, I stuck to my guns like a little trooper and tried my best to make myself drift off. First rule: don't actually dwell on how you need too sleep, or about how you eventually need to get up. Let yourself have the option. "You'll sleep or you won't, no big deal," you tell yourself. "If you don't fall asleep, you'll just get up for a while. No pressure."

Not thinking about sleeping is like not thinking about breathing. It's a great theory but once the question is raised, it can be difficult to banish. Like that old Greek trick about elephants...Luckily, my mind wanders well. I can usually distract myself by thinking about all the way in which I could have lived better, or what I'd ask for if I got three wishes, or how I'd re-roll myself if I was a character in a role-playing game. You know, defeatist fantasies. Stuff like that...it usually puts me right out.


Not this night, however. After over an hour of just not sleeping, I got back out of bed, thinking that maybe I could tire myself out with a snack and some reading. It kinda worked...but it took too long, and now I'm pretty much screwed into staying up. My only hope is that I won't be too horribly tired by the end of my shift. Which, luckily, is only a part-time shift. Still, I hate having to force myself to do anything- to sleep, or to stay awake as the case may be. Call it a discipline problem, or a resentment of any authority (even my own).

5:45 am * Yawn *

Damn it. No real hope for a nap now...even if I didn't know that an hour nap would just make me feel worse in the end, I know that it would be mostly an hour of hearing my my wife's alarm clocks; it takes three alarms, set at intervals spanning 45 minutes, to get her out of bed in the morning. Seems to me like a good way to start the day totally annoyed...but whatever works, right? Anyway, the 6 to 7 am hour is simply not useful. At best, at the end of a night's sleep, it may be a gradual surfacing into consciousness...but for a subsistence nap, it may be possibly the single worst hour of the day around here.

6 am. Yep, I'm definitely tired enough to get to sleep now. The first alarm clock has gone off and I'm screwed. But oh well, I'll just grab a nap when I'm done with work and that should hold me until later tonight. As long as I don't sleep though the whole afternoon, this will push me back into a decent schedule.

Damn, I've spent weeks...months...years like this! No wonder a more 'normal' schedule seemed like such a relief, such a positive step.

I've never been an early riser; the term itself embodies an alien quality for me, something that I can intellectually understand that other people possess...but with no personal empathy whatsoever. It is something I can do, on occasion, and if I must, but the fact that there are actually people who voluntarily choose to wake up more than an hour before they absolutely have to...I just don't get it.

Nope, I want to stay up until my body tells me it needs to sleep, and the stay that way until my body lets me know that it's had all the sleep it wants. Is that sloth? Decadence? It seems to me that paying attention to my body's messages is essential, but perhaps I'm missing an important point...

I don't want to seem too defensive...I recognize that we cannot often arrange the world according to our own schedules...but honestly, why does the world mostly operate on such a directly opposite schedule? I know I'm not the only person who prefers to sleep a little late in the mornings...why does the world seem so intrinsically opposed to that? Why must we conform to a day that starts at sunrise and winds down in the latter afternoon/ early evening? Very few of us are still farmers, by the way...what earthly reason is there not to set expect a few more personal hours in the morning before work, school, et cetera...I can't help but think that we'd all benefit from the sheer number of people who would be happier and better prepared for the day...


6:30 am. Getting a little bleary-eyed now. Great. Coffee's ready, and I get to wake my wife up. At least if I'm awake I can turn off half of those damn alarm clocks. All except that damn rhythmic pattern on her cell phone...three or four specifically programmed instances. This is a woman who wants to be sure she gets up...and doesn't mind repeatedly pissing herself off every single day in order to do so. Theres probably some conclusions that could be drawn here, but I'm too tired to do too much philosophizing.