Insomnia is a strange thing. It’s a war, a war between the person who has it and whatever it is that keeps him or her from sleeping. It’s an invisible creature that attacks when it pleases. I equate it with a sniper in a war: whenever it has an easy, clear shot, it takes it and usually hits its target dead on.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been sleeping well every night. Then, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, it hit again last night. I fell asleep around 1 a.m. and awoke at 4 a.m. I lay there for 30 minutes, hoping that I’d fall back to sleep, but it didn’t happen. So I got up at 4:30 and took a sleeping pill.
To make the best use of my time awake, I read. I have several magazine subscriptions and find it difficult to maintain a regular reading schedule, so I read several articles this morning.
At about 5:30 I felt a little bit hungry. I went to the kitchen, poured some milk into a glass and ate a half dozen Oreos dipped in milk, then returned to the couch and continued reading. At 6:45 my pill was working its magic. I went back to bed and slept until 10:15.
Insomnia causes us to go to extremes for sleep. We insomniacs are fearful of not sleeping because we know what life is like without sleep. It’s miserable times 100 or 1000.
I have to sleep. As I’ve written before on this blog, insomnia is much harder to live with at age 54 than it was at age 24. Other conditions add to the complexity of life with insomnia, too. For the last 11 consecutive days, daytime temperatures have risen to at least 100 degrees F. or higher. Temperatures that high affect everything and everyone, especially insomniacs. We don’t have a full “tank of gas” in us to begin with, and the heat easily makes life that much more intolerable for us. We can’t call in sick every time our insomnia strikes because we’d soon be unemployed.
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