Fucking insomnia

When I was younger, I always thought insomnia meant 3am wakefulness and tossing and turning and not being able to fall asleep. I thought I was immune. I never had problems sleeping through the night, nor did I have difficulty falling asleep. But I was always an extremely early riser. Now I know better. Insomnia is your red, bleary eyes popping open at 5:30 AM and your heart pounding with excitement at the idea of waking up while the rest of your physiology rails profanities at it. Blagh.

Not being able to go back to sleep is a bitch. Especially when you’ve only had four or five hours of quality snooze time and it’s the seventh day in a row that this has happened. Fuckity fuckity fuck.

Matthew saw a show, several weeks ago, on the Biography channel or Discovery channel or something, about many great (terrible) historical world leaders. People like Stalin and Hitler and Mao, and some of them were loons, and some of them just really ambitious, but all of them, down to the last one, had problems sleeping. There’s also a greater percentage of tortured artists who have sleep dysfunctions.

Oh, and did I mention that sleep problems are a major symptom of incumbent or progressing mental illness? Well, it’s nice that my graduate degree in Psychology is of some use. I can tick off the symptoms of my ailing brain as they happen and hand a diagnosis on a plate to my physician. And then I can write my own psychotropics cocktail prescription. Snarl.

I wonder how much of it is whacked out circadian rhythms? I’ve always had an internal wake-alarm (and they’re only now examining the existence of an internal alarm clock in sleep research–snarf. The sillies.) which tended to wake me about a minute before my digital alarm went off, or that I could set if I needed to wake up in the AM without an alarm clock, but I think the clock in my brain got skewed. Like when you reach your arm out in bed and accidentally thunk your clock and it jumps forward a couple hours. That’s me. One poorly set clock.

Oh well. I’ll be awake for sure when my alarm goes off in about . . . oh an hour. So we won’t be late picking up our friend, Paul, at the airport. He’s flying in from Illinois to visit over the long holiday weekend. Hurray!

Hah. I ended this ranting entry on an up note. Good for me.

Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Fucking insomnia

  1. prosewitch says:

    Look at the bright side–at least you know for sure that you’re not one of the Sleepless like in Nancy Kress’s novel Beggars in Spain (which is an awesome book, read it if you haven’t!). Teehee, you make psychology degrees sound real useful…all I can do with folklore is recommend folk medicine. Eye of newt and tongue of bat, anyone? ;-D

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *