Diary of an insomniac

"Night comes" Pencil sketch

What keeps you up at night?  Its two a.m. and you are wide awake, tossing and turning.  You felt tired when you first got into bed and then, well, you just couldn’t shut your mind off.  You were planning your day, heck you were planning six month’s into the future and what you weren’t doing was sleeping.

As you lay there in the dark hoping for that elusive 8 hours you watch the glowing green number on your digital clock as it changes.  Every so often you count…

”If I go to sleep right now I will be getting one, two, three, four, five, hours of sleep before the alarm goes off.”

 In what seems like seconds you are counting again…

”One, two, three, four hours before the alarm goes off.”

Those 8 hours are becoming harder and harder to imagine.

So you start to get desperate and decide to try some remedies that you may have laughed about previously.  Sleep deprivation makes us do strange things.  You count sheep.  Come on now, whoever thought of counting sheep must have been a bit of a jokester.  Why not horses, or cows or even greyhounds?  It doesn’t take long before you realize whatever animal you imagine will be the only one getting tired. So you go to the kitchen to warm up some milk.  Seriously?  After a couple of swallows between gags you come to the conclusion that warm milk is just gross.  I mean, what the hell is that gooey skin?

“If I go to sleep right now I will be getting one, two, three hours before the alarm goes off.”

The alarm goes off and you shuffle into the kitchen for some coffee hoping that someone else has already made it.  There’s not enough coffee on the planet for this kind of morning.

So the next night you are intent on making up for the lack of sleep the previous night.  I may not be an expert but I have few suggestions that work for me.

Take a warm bath and grab the most boring book you can find. Leave the planning for tomorrow. Don’t try and figure out where you are going to seat grandma Ruth at your next party so she won’t be near Aunt Edith to whom she hasn’t spoken in six years. Your mother was right; you can’t solve all the world’s problems.  Leave the economy to the politicians. Try not to eat anything before bed. Don’t exercise at night because that’s just going to rev you up.  No looking at the clock, and absolutely no counting…”if I go to sleep right now I will be getting one, two, three….