For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^
I know the way this one sounds, but it’s actually not going to be about anxiety or stress or anything like that (although they may play a part, depending on how you look at it).
I lose a great deal of sleep on a regular basis, and it’s all because my brain evidently refuses to switch off. Now, I have no problems actually falling asleep. Unlike my husband – who needs something like a TV show to distract his brain so he can just zone out and eventually fall asleep – I can go from fully awake to out cold in just a few short minutes. Falling asleep has never been my problem.
My problem is the dreams.
Now, I’ve never had a sleep study or anything like that done, so I can’t rightly say that the dreams themselves are the problems, or if they’re just a symptom of my body refusing to sleep properly, but one thing is clear, and that’s the fact that I spend a very large amount of time in REM sleep. I’ve complained for years that I spend all night every night dreaming, and subsequently had people scoff and inform me (as though I’d never heard this information before) that we only actually dream in the few minutes that we spend in REM sleep, but what I’ve learned through specialized devices and apps that monitor your sleep, that “few minutes” for me is more like “a third of the night”.
I have blockbuster full-length motion picture dreams, you guys, and I’m not even exaggerating. My dreams feature a huge number of characters, intricate plots, and a flurry of emotions. They are extremely detailed and extremely vivid. I’ve written down dreams that took a dozen pages to fully explain, and I’ve woken up from dreams absolutely devastated by the events that unfurled because I was absolutely convinced they’d actually happened. I’ve had dreams that made me feel like weeks passed in the time I spent asleep, and I’ve had dreams that absolutely exhausted me, both emotionally and physically, to the point that I’d swear I never slept at all.
The best part, however, is that there’s basically nothing I, or anyone else can do about it. Sleeping pills are a common suggestion, but those drugs are specifically designed to put you to sleep. They do very little to actually keep you asleep, which is where my problem lies. I drift in and out of my sleep cycle, spending more time in the “practically awake” phase than in the “deep asleep” phase, and I’ve been told flat out that there is nothing currently available that addresses that particular issue. So I guess, for the foreseeable future I just continue to lose sleep on a regular basis.
At least the dreams are good writing fodder. 🙂
How do you sleep? Any troubles at all? Any outrageous dreams? Feel free to leave a comment!
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I don’t have a lot of trouble getting to sleep, but I have a really tough time waking up in the morning. A lot of people tell me, “Yeah, I don’t like mornings either,” but I strongly suspect there’s more to it than just that.
Do you generally wake up in darkness? I know a few people who just literally can’t function until there’s been sunlight on them for a while, because their bodies don’t produce serotonin properly.
I hadn’t really thought about that. Some light does get in around the curtains, so t’s not totally dark, but it’s still pretty dim.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with light when working out West because of the long days they have so far North in Alberta. The worst would be during the summer, because I slept from approximately 9 pm to 4 am (had to get on the bus at 5 am), and in the dead of summer it doesn’t actually get dark until about 11:30 pm. So I’d have to cover up the windows with anything I could find to make it dark enough to fall asleep, but then that meant I was waking up in pitch dark as well. It can really screw with your system.