Insomnia simply sucks. I think I’ve written that somewhere before. When my insomnia began in 1979, my problem was falling asleep.
Now, it’s staying asleep all night. I rarely sleep all the way through. Last night, for example, I awoke at 4:00 a.m. unable to go back to sleep.
So I got out of bed, put on my robe, turned on the living room lamp, and read for two hours. I started nodding off again a little before 6:00.
I went back to bed and slept until 9:00 when I heard Donna say from across the room, “Are you going to sleep all day?”
“I was awake from 4 to 6 and read for two hours,” I said. So, technically, it was only 7:00 a.m. when she woke me up.
I slept a grand total of seven hours. No doubt, there are people in this world who would kill for seven hours of sleep in one night, regardless of whether or not it was in shifts. But sleeping “in shifts” has its own problems.
Even though the total was seven hours, which I can function on just fine, I still have this aching-eye thing and a dull headache. My eyeballs feel as though they’re set back about a half inch into their sockets farther than they should be. Granted, this is a minor feeling when compared with the feeling of pulling an all-nighter, or consecutive all-nighters.
During the past fifteen years, I’ve awakened so many times in the middle of the night that it now angers me when it happens. So adding anger to the 4:00 a.m. awakening results in even more stress when trying to return to sleep.
Still, after all of these years of living with insomnia, there is not a day that passes that I don’t wonder if, when, or how I will sleep that night. I’ve written before about how living with insomnia is like having a bulldog firmly and permanently attached to my rear end: It’s there constantly making my life miserable. There is no escape.
Even on the days after I sleep seven or eight hours straight, I still wonder about the next night.
Mike
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