Sleepy Time #15

Now, I know I've not done one of these posts for a while, but then, there's not really been anything to report. If you remember, when I started out, the sleep-times were 0200-0600, and the first week, that was easy peasy.

Lemon squeezy, in fact.

After that, it went from 0100-0600 and that, shall we say, was a little harder. My body was not a happy chappy. Some nights I would toss and turn for half an hour, then have to get up (as I'm only allowed to spend 30 minutes trying to sleep) and go sit downstairs for half an hour, then go back up - so back up to bed for 2am. Some nights, the opposite would happen - I would doze off without any hassle, but then wake up around 5am, and not get back to sleep...

And until I can sleep the 0100-0600 without any issues for a solid week without any issues, I don't get to add my additional hour.

Monday is that magical day. Assuming I sleep tonight and tomorrow night without any hiccups, Monday I get to change to 0000-0600. Now, that might not sound like a lot to most of you normal "Sleepers" but to any insomniac out there, I bet you cash-money they would give ME cash-money to sleep in such a big block.

I knew this was going to be tough, and I have very nearly thrown in the towel many times. I haven't, though, simply because I WANT to have a relatively normal sleeping pattern. I was impressed when I started, sleeping for 4 hours at a time - that, to a proper insomniac is like a chocolate-covered virgin.

And when I say "Proper Insomniac" I mean those of us that don't sleep MOST nights. The ones that go to bed at say 2230, toss and turn for a while, read for a bit, have a wander, have a drink, toss and turn, doze off for three nanoseconds, wake up for a while, toss and turn, fiddle with the phone, tweet about how tired you are, toss and turn and then, finally, doze off for 40 minutes only to have to get up for school/work or whatever.

Those of you that wake up every now and then at 3am, jump out of bed, play on the Playstation, and tell the world about your awful insomnia, go back to sleep at 5am, get up at 10am, and then have a nap in the middle of the day - once in a blue moon - you're not insomniac.

So, yes, this is definitely working and despite being a hard slog, I am winning. If you had told me a couple of months back that I would be sleeping in constant blocks of four and then five hours, I'd have laughed at you.

The hard part is every other waking hour though. I am pretty much running on autopilot for the most part, and staying awake during the day is proving tough, but there are enough people around that enjoy lobbing a pillow at me and yell "Incoming!" as they do so to prevent me sleeping during the day. Evenings are rough too - especially trying to watch things I want to watch... I had to re-watch two of the three episodes of Sherlock, I have had to rewatch several episodes of House and Big Bang Theory simply because I was nodding off throughout the whole program.

Kellie has - on a couple of occasions - stayed downstairs with me till 1am. When I say "Stayed downstairs" and not "Stayed up with me" what I really mean is, she's slept on the sofa beside me, and I've had to wake her up to come to bed at 1am.

While it's novel that we "go to bed together" the conversation IS lacking while she's down here. Unless I just make up her side of it every time she snores, in which case, she doesn't shut up talking!

The side effects are still mostly present, but I am ignoring them as best I can. The worst one - aside from nodding off at the drop of a hat regardless of what I am doing - is seeing things out the corner of my eye. It's so distracting, it's not even funny. I also have moments where I've not "fallen asleep" but my brain has shut off for a minute or two an started dreaming, and when it reboots, I have to concentrate for a few moments to work out if what happened actually happened, or if it was me making it up unconsciously.

(Geek Paragraphs Start!)
Playing WoW to stay awake is also comedy gold. I can be playing normally, then my brain will start randomly dozing off/waking up in thirty second blocks. So I can kill a creature, loot it, run towards the next to kill it... And then wake up, to find my finger still on "Run Fowards" my health on half, and every mob with that was in the area chasing me and hitting me in the spine.

Playing in Outland is even MORE amusing... Kill mob, loot mob, run towards mob... Wake up dead having fallen off the edge of the world. I've done THAT several times now. And flying - I will jump on my flying mount to go from Point A to Point B... And wake up on the other side of the zone. Night before last, it took FOUR attempt to fly from A to B, and mid-way through each flight I dozed off, thus moving Point A - the starting point - to a different place every time.
(Geek Paragraphs End)

Even blogging or texting can prove interesting to do. I was texting Posh Totty the other night, but halfway through every message, my brain shut down - and I'd open my eyes to find that despite the brain being dead, the fingers were still active, and the message would be something like

"Oh I'm OK, just very tired, and after cooking chilli forn sihfdsg asdi3 inf qfubsdgpihdf ojfub"

And stranger still - I would have forgotten WHAT I was saying. So I'd have to go back, re-read her original message, delete mine and start over - sometimes having nothing to do with what I've written. It's like that in the brief moment of time I was asleep, the brain was trying to flush out all the stuff it could get rid of as quickly as it could, for whatever reason - kind of like when you're in a rush, deleting files off your hard drive, and all of a sudden, Windows crashes as that last one was a system file...

I can see now how people driving while exhausted can cause accidents. In the past, I've just assumed that when they talk about "Driving Tired" I believed they meant simply because when you're tired, your reaction times are slower. If my own experiences are anything to go by, you can't just say "Oh I'll be fine, I'll keep myself awake" because you don't actually know you're dozing off until you wake up and realise "Oh I dozed off" which is quite scary.

The brain, it would seem, does not like to be forced to stay awake, and in a power struggle of Doing Stuff vs. It Wanting Sleep - you lose every time.

Anyways, fingers crossed that I sleep "properly" for the next couple of nights. Midnight til Six might sound like the opening hours to a pretty good club, but it is an even more appealing sleep schedule!