#oneaday Day 709: Reasonable Hour

I’m thinking this through this time, writing my entry for today before getting involved in anything which I might want to continue doing until the wee small hours of the morning, as has happened for the last two nights straight. Oddly enough, despite waking relatively “early” (for the holiday season, anyway) I didn’t feel too bad as the world came back into focus after only a few hours’ sleep.

I have a curious relationship with sleep. I like sleeping, but I also find it an enormous waste of time. I suffer from some degree of insomnia for the vast majority of the time, meaning I often find it very difficult to actually drift off to sleep once I’m lying in bed with my head on the pillow. It’s not anything specific keeping me awake, generally — I can and will always nod off eventually, even if there’s someone drilling a hole in the road outside or snoring thunderously in the same room as me. But sleep is one of those things that the harder you try to grab hold of, the more elusive it is. The more aware you are of the fact that you “should” be going to sleep, the less likely you are to actually fall asleep.

I say “you”. I mean “me”, because I know not everyone is like this. Several people I know have the uncanny ability to close their eyes, rest their head and be in the land of Nod (not the Command & Conquer variety) almost immediately, whatever happens to be going on around them. In the case of some friends, it became something of a “party trick”, albeit a usually involuntary one. Mercifully, however, my friends have never been the type to deface a sleeping person by shaving off eyebrows or beards — or indeed adding any adornments with marker pens. The closest we have come to defiling a sleeping figure came at my friend Ben’s Halloween party when he fell asleep rather early in the evening, still in most of his wizard costume (sans beard, sadly). Other friends Woody (dressed as Death) and Mike (dressed as Gay Satan) posed with the recumbent Ben for some photographs that remain, to date, some of my favourite “visual memories” of that particular group of friends.

But I digress. I find it very difficult to get to sleep, particularly if I get into bed at what your parents call a “reasonable hour”. I find my mind wandering — not necessarily in an anxious way, though if I am anxious about anything, lying in the dark trying to get to sleep is inevitably the time that every anxiety and neurosis comes out to play — and this makes it terribly difficult to clear out all those extraneous, unnecessary thoughts which it’s impossible to act on while lying in bed. While your brain is full of such garbage, it’s a challenge to convince your body that now is the time for rest. Inevitably, I’ll find myself attempting to do something distracting. It could be playing with my phone, it could be reading a book by the light of my phone, or in extreme cases, getting up altogether and doing something other than lying staring at the inside of my eyelids.

One thing I’ve noticed since I was younger is that it’s more difficult to “focus” at the time when I’m trying to get to sleep than it used to be. When I was younger, I found it very easy to slip into imaginative fantasy, half dreaming, half actively imagining and directing my thoughts, picturing myself on grand adventures. Frequently, these mental excursions would lead to slumber and some colourful dreams, so I often found it a good way to see myself through the night.

I’ve tried doing the same thing in recent years, however, and I find it enormously difficult to concentrate on the sense of “narrative” inherent in these brain-fuelled adventures. I don’t generally have a problem concentrating while I’m awake — I’m quite happy to sit staring at something I’m working on or playing with for hours at a time, but as soon as it comes to trying to concentrate on getting to sleep? My brain seems to release the floodgates of all the thoughts that I’ve been storing in my own internal “deal with later” pile.

You know when it’s not difficult to get to sleep, though? In the morning. On many occasions I’ve been woken up by my alarm (or indeed by Andie getting out of bed to go to work) and have promptly fallen back asleep almost immediately — for hours at a time on many occasions. The interesting thing about these morning “extra” sleeps is that they almost always feature incredibly vivid dreams, and since they occur during short sleeps just before I get up and switch my brain into “daytime” gear, I can usually remember at least a few details from them for most of the rest of the day. It’s during morning slumbers I’ve had bizarre and diverse imaginary encounters such as being utterly convinced that it would be impossible to have sex with someone if I didn’t have the right sheet music with me; or finding myself in my parents’ dining room with a male voice choir literally singing for my supper.

Sleep, then, is good — some might call it necessary. I just wish it was more a case of flipping a “standby” switch rather than spending all that time and effort trying to power down for the evening — time which I would rather spend doing something much more fun!