Throughout my life, whenever I had trouble sleeping, I would simply turn around. If my feet were facing one way and my head the other but without sleep a'coming, I'd simply rotate so my feet would be where my head once was. Usually this would quickly lead to my REM'ing out...no matter how long I had been waiting for it the other way around. How could a simple shift could result in such a profound thing: sleep. There are a number of kinds of sleeplessness. There's the drinking all night, can't possibly sleep sleeplessness. But that really is more of a delayed sleepfulness. There is the I can't stop thinking about this really exciting thing that's going to happen tomorrow sleeplessness. There is the I can't stop thinking about this really sad thing that's already happened and there's nothing I can do to change it sleeplessness. There's the I heard a noise outside/downstairs/in my closet that I can't explain sleeplessness. There's the (this one is akin to the something really exciting) I have an early flight/drive/event to get up for tomorrow so I've gone to sleep at 10 to make sure I'll be fresh but now it's midnight sleeplessness. Then there is true insomnia. The kind where you lie in bed for too many hours and, finally, you get up. I rarely get this kind. I have had bouts of slightly purposeful sleeplessness...when a friend died I vaguely recall not sleeping properly on purpose...the rationale being that if I didn't go to sleep I wouldn't awake the such a terrible truth.
Lately, or as often as the podcast build up allows, I put myself into a sleeping state by listening to Garrison Keillor do his opening Lake Woebegone monologue. I always start out wanting to listen to the shape of his story, the way he comes up with it as he goes along (I heard this to be true, that it's improv story telling), where he gets a bit lost in the narrative and how he gets back to it...but in the end his voice puts me into a dream state. Or, not a dream state, an almost asleep and so comfy state. Unfortunately he does one monologue a week but I have to sleep each night. So...
You'd think I was having trouble sleeping but I'm not. Just thinking about it. And how last week I changed positions in order to sleep and I still haven't reoriented myself. I'm still sleeping in a direction that brings me sleep. But how long before a night comes, a night of some kind of sleeplessness, and I can find nothing else to do but switch again. And if that new direction, that used to be the old direction, works in the same way that the old new direction did then, well, what is the power of it?
1 comment:
I know what you mean.
The night before graduation in college, I postponed going to bed for as long as possible because I knew when I woke up, college would be over.
I've had sleep issues since sophomore year though. They suck.
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