I am not a good sleeper. It is something I inherited from my grandmother. It skipped a generation, since my mother sleeps like a log as soon as she hits the horizontal plane, but reared its ugly head when I was born.
There is nowhere to go lying on your back, waiting for sleep. I could spend time in my toes or elbows but there is not much going on there, except the occasional itches or twitches.
My head is where things happen, mostly beyond my control. I approach with apprehension; a sign reads, ‘organizing strictly prohibited.’
As I walk about in that chaotic place, I stub my toes against remnants of my day scattered on the floor. Did I turn the stove off? Did I put the leftover food in the fridge? Did I close my car windows? Usually, those nasty little buggers cross my mental path when I am almost asleep, and with a jolt, I am wide awake again, heart pounding. I am back to square one.
Insomniacs are advised to establish what is known as sleep hygiene. You couldn’t come up with a more distasteful term if you tried.
To develop sleep hygiene, experts provide a lengthy list of dos and don’ts, which carries the risk of investing half your evening preparing for something that might never materialize.
It is recommended that you exercise for half an hour, then take a warm bath or shower, and top that off with relaxation exercises for another 30 minutes to an hour. Unfortunately, the don’ts list includes all of the things that I really like: drinking alcohol, watching a whodunit movie that gets my heart rate up and texting about not being able to sleep.
To make up for that, I rely on a bag full of paraphernalia that includes earplugs, a face mask, soft music, a soft pillow, scented candles, etc. I watch psychedelic movies that are supposed to put me in a trance, and if you promise not to laugh, I will divulge my secret ingredient: I knit entire sweaters in my head before I am able to fall asleep. If you knew how many sweaters I knitted, you would be proud of me. Some with rainbow stripes, some dull grey, others with a star shape. On good nights, I fall asleep in the 4th or 5th row. Other nights, my sweater looks more like a 10-foot-long scarf before I give up and throw the whole scarf in my mental trash.
But deep down, I know why I cannot sleep. I am a perfectionist. I want to be the perfect sleeper. I am lying there, teeth clenched, rigid as a board, counting the minutes. Every second that passes, my self-image is taken down a notch. Shouldn’t I be capable of sleeping? Don’t healthy, normal functioning people sleep when they want to? Why cannot I?! What’s wrong with me? Am I abnormal? Neurotic? Dysfunctional?
It’s exhausting to have to order your body to fall asleep. My body doesn’t react kindly to bullying. Why cannot I be more like my husband, who can sleep anywhere, anytime? We are lying in bed together, and before I can count to ten, he is snoring away, leaving me hanging out to dry. It’s very rude, you know. No sympathy for his life partner. We have gone through so much together, but when it comes to sleeping, he just goes off, on his own, as if I didn’t exist. Sheesh.
Those are the nights when I have nothing else to do but open one of the many closet doors in my head, where forgotten thoughts are stashed. I never know what is stored behind those doors. I open one, and memories of my teaching days come crashing to the floor, the air filled with old feelings of stress and inadequacy. Of being judged and reprimanded.
I wish I could fill my head with cotton wool. Something so boring, so monotonous, that no thinking would be involved in diving into it, like a large, unmoving body of water. Left or right, up or down, it would be the same everywhere! What bliss.
But for now, I will have to rely on my knitting strategy. In fact, the knitting has started to invade my waking hours. Right now, as I sit here typing, I am looking forward to continuing that one special sweater I started last night in my head. I am already contemplating what colors I should incorporate in my design.
But after many unfinished mental sweaters, even my knitting strategy started to wear off. In desperation, I followed my friend’s advice: ‘Try cannabis,’ she said. ‘It does wonders.
To make up for that, I rely on a bag full of paraphernalia that includes earplugs, a face mask, soft music, a soft pillow, scented candles, etc. I watch psychedelic movies that are supposed to put me in a trance, and if you promise not to laugh, I will divulge my secret ingredient: I knit entire sweaters in my head before I am able to fall asleep. If you knew how many sweaters I knitted, you would be proud of me. Some with rainbow stripes, some dull grey, others with a star shape. On good nights, I fall asleep in the 4th or 5th row. Other nights, my sweater looks more like a 10-foot-long scarf before I give up and throw the whole scarf in my mental trash.
But deep down, I know why I cannot sleep. I am a perfectionist. I want to be the perfect sleeper. I am lying there, teeth clenched, rigid as a board, counting the minutes. Every second that passes, my self-image is taken down a notch. Shouldn’t I be capable of sleeping? Don’t healthy, normal functioning people sleep when they want to? Why cannot I?! What’s wrong with me? Am I abnormal? Neurotic? Dysfunctional?
It’s exhausting to have to order your body to fall asleep. My body doesn’t react kindly to bullying. Why cannot I be more like my husband, who can sleep anywhere, anytime? We are lying in bed together, and before I can count to ten, he is snoring away, leaving me hanging out to dry. It’s very rude, you know. No sympathy for his life partner. We have gone through so much together, but when it comes to sleeping, he just goes off, on his own, as if I didn’t exist. Sheesh.
Those are the nights when I have nothing else to do but open one of the many closet doors in my head, where forgotten thoughts are stashed. I never know what is stored behind those doors. I open one, and memories of my teaching days come crashing to the floor, the air filled with old feelings of stress and inadequacy. Of being judged and reprimanded.
I wish I could fill my head with cotton wool. Something so boring, so monotonous, that no thinking would be involved in diving into it, like a large, unmoving body of water. Left or right, up or down, it would be the same everywhere! What bliss.
But for now, I will have to rely on my knitting strategy. In fact, the knitting has started to invade my waking hours. Right now, as I sit here typing, I am looking forward to continuing that one special sweater I started last night in my head. I am already contemplating what colors I should incorporate in my design.
But after many unfinished mental sweaters, even my knitting strategy started to wear off. In desperation, I followed my friend’s advice: ‘Try cannabis,’ she said. ‘It does wonders.
Cannabis products are legal in my state, and the industry is booming. The dispensary I went to was particular BIG. It sold many types of weed, there was a section just for paraphernalia, and it even had a fireplace with a cozy seating arrangement.
I went home with a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys,’ and took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleep aid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.
I went home with a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys,’ and took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleep aid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.
I was lying in bed, waiting for the magic bullet to hit me. Nothing. I mentally cursed Bedtime Betty, telling her that she shouldn’t impersonate the sleep fairy, since she didn’t deliver on her promise. I was lying there, teeth clenched, eyelids squeezed shut, neck muscles spasming, blaming my own naivete and the young salesman who had convinced me of the power of Betty over insomnia.
Suddenly, without any warning, my head started to fill with all sorts of strange and wonderful images. I was floating in a sky filled with foam, like the blanket of clouds that an airplane dives into when approaching an overcast city.
Whenever I focused on one cloud, another one was begging for my attention. I was a butterfly, fluttering from one wonderful thought cloud to another. This was a strange experience. I am usually more like a moth with OCD. I circle a thought, like a moth circles a light bulb, around and around, until they burn themselves to death.
It felt wonderful to be a butterfly for a change. Some were good clouds, others were not. There were clouds that contained toxic material about dying, others that contained instructions on how to knit better mental sweaters, and others yet that revealed the ‘multiverse’ theory to me on a quantum level. In plain English: I was STONED!
This went on for a while, but then Bedtime Betty decided I should focus on my body rather than my thoughts. I could feel every muscle in my face (there are about 50 of them) and the tension they carry like second nature. The frown in my forehead, the tightness in my lips, the tension in my jaws. I had complete control over them. I could make them R…E…L…A…X.
My tongue started to unstick itself from my palate and fell limp on the bed of my mouth, like a pancake. It got so relaxed that it grew in size and started to push itself out of my mouth, like an inflated snake. Ok. Enough of that, I thought. This is getting too freaky.
Onto another body part. I veered toward my forehead. I was the size of a skin microbe trying to scale the deep furrows of my frown. Slowly, the ridges and valleys morphed into a smooth terrain, covered with flowers. I was the navigator on my body’s ship. I was master and commander of my own physical and mental self. It was wonderful.
I moved to turn on my side, but I was tied down by a thousand ropes like Gulliver by the Lilliputians. My body was made of lead. If this is what THC does to a person lying flat in bed, what happens when you are trying to drive a car? How can thoughts be so quick and agile, unencumbered by matter and the body so resistant to change? I told Bedtime Betty I wanted to go back to my thoughts where I could leap, fly and dance around at my heart’s content and she magnanimously consented.
Once more, I was floating around in cotton wool. A cloud marked ‘husband’ approached. I knocked on the cloud, but he wasn’t home. There was a little note that said ‘gone fishing for a new wife’. It wasn’t all that surprising. We had gotten into a fight that evening. A large cloud came into view with post-it notes stuck on its surface, all neatly lined up. The first one read ‘road to acceptance’.
‘Oh God, not a self-improvement cloud,’ I thought. But it was one of those word clouds, guiding my brain into a superlative game. Ok, I’ll play. First you have‘rejection’, then you ‘repudiate’, after that you ‘tolerate’, then you ‘accept ’, and finally ‘embrace’? It sounded a lot like the Kubler-Ross theory of acceptance of death.
So deep, so intense, so visionary, so brilliant, so…
Then, I finally fell asleep. leave comment here
Onto another body part. I veered toward my forehead. I was the size of a skin microbe trying to scale the deep furrows of my frown. Slowly, the ridges and valleys morphed into a smooth terrain, covered with flowers. I was the navigator on my body’s ship. I was master and commander of my own physical and mental self. It was wonderful.
I moved to turn on my side, but I was tied down by a thousand ropes like Gulliver by the Lilliputians. My body was made of lead. If this is what THC does to a person lying flat in bed, what happens when you are trying to drive a car? How can thoughts be so quick and agile, unencumbered by matter and the body so resistant to change? I told Bedtime Betty I wanted to go back to my thoughts where I could leap, fly and dance around at my heart’s content and she magnanimously consented.
Once more, I was floating around in cotton wool. A cloud marked ‘husband’ approached. I knocked on the cloud, but he wasn’t home. There was a little note that said ‘gone fishing for a new wife’. It wasn’t all that surprising. We had gotten into a fight that evening. A large cloud came into view with post-it notes stuck on its surface, all neatly lined up. The first one read ‘road to acceptance’.
‘Oh God, not a self-improvement cloud,’ I thought. But it was one of those word clouds, guiding my brain into a superlative game. Ok, I’ll play. First you have‘rejection’, then you ‘repudiate’, after that you ‘tolerate’, then you ‘accept ’, and finally ‘embrace’? It sounded a lot like the Kubler-Ross theory of acceptance of death.
So deep, so intense, so visionary, so brilliant, so…
Then, I finally fell asleep. leave comment here
