I started having insomnia a few months after my mom was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer.
I had moved away to college in late September and she was diagnosed, I believe, in November. By springtime, I was having trouble sleeping. A high school classmate of mine had died in a motorcycle accident that winter. A fellow student in my Romantic Literature class was hit by a car and killed while jogging. The news from home wasn’t good. I felt surrounded by death.
I shared a bedroom at the time, and even though I lived in an apartment, one of my other housemates always slept on the fold-out couch in the living room with her boyfriend. When I was awake in the middle of the night, there was nowhere to go where I could cry or turn on the lights and read. So instead I’d go outside and sit in the dark on the front stoop or on top of the picnic table, a box of tissues by my feet.
There is a special kind of hush that happens at three or four in the morning. The stillness of the night while I sat on that stoop spoke of shutters being closed over the normal world while everyone slept. Everyone but me. I couldn’t sleep, so instead I sat. I thought about my mom and I wondered why people have to die and I wondered if I hoped hard enough maybe she would be okay after all and I wished I could sleep so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.
In the daylight hours, it’s not quite so difficult to keep the dark and grief-stained thoughts at bay. But in the shadows and the quiet, there’s no longer anything blocking them from view.
I was eighteen.
Photo by Elina Linina.
Ever since that time, there have been nights when I can’t sleep. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m too excited about the day I’ve had or the trip I’m taking in the morning or I’m worried about tomorrow or I haven’t allowed enough downtime before going to bed. Sleeping at conventions can be tricky for these sorts of reasons. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m sick or in physical pain.
And sometimes I can’t sleep because my heart hurts. These are always the worst nights. They remind me of those nights on the stoop, sobbing quietly for an incomprehensible loss I could do nothing to stop. I used to hope that if I cried enough, I’d create enough space for the sleep to come.
There are times when insomnia visits for a reason. Sleep stays away so that I pay attention. Often it’s something I don’t want to pay attention to, but my body has its own ideas of what’s good for me. Sometimes it’s even right.
What is insomnia like for you?
The Practical Free Spirit 
I’m lucky to have never really have experienced random insomnia. By random, I mean not directly caused by me.
If I have trouble sleeping it’s either because I drank too much caffeine, I played a hockey game that night (seriously, we have 10:45 PM games and the adrenaline keeps me awake until 2 AM), or we have a baby in the house (2 is enough for us).
“In the daylight hours, it’s not quite so difficult to keep the dark and grief-stained thoughts at bay.”
When my daughter was a baby, she was the worst sleeper, up every two hours for her first year of life at least. I experienced these “dark thoughts (my own mortality was a re-occuring theme)” moments often in those days. I don’t know what it is about the daylight that keeps them at bay, but I’m thankful for that.
Paul (paulliadis.com/blog)
((Amy))
Over the past four years or so, my family has experienced a lot of challenges. We lost our home and everything we owned in a fire, lost a child to cancer, and my husband and I both lost our only siblings within a year of each other…
Insomnia and I are good friends. Sometimes she strikes by keeping me from falling asleep, no matter how tired I am. It used to be, on those nights, I’d take showers… sometimes 2 or 3… trying to use the streaming water as a balm for whatever within me was bruised and aching.
Lately, however, insomnia has changed her pattern… she strikes by waking me up from a deep sleep at 3am. Abruptly I find my eyes flying open, my heart pounding in my chest, and all my sense alert. I lay there in the dark, listening intently, trying to be sure that I’m not missing a child’s cry or a catch in my husband’s breathing… and then I wonder if some nightmare has struck someone I care about who doesn’t live with me and if I’ll be receiving a call to inform me of some tragedy from farther away.
I hate these night terrors… but I have learned that they last for shorter periods when I’m gentle with myself… when I allow myself to cry and to grieve for the losses that my daytime self prefers to shove deep within and avoid.
My bouts of insomnia seem to come mostly at random. Occasionally, I will have it several days in a row. Most often when it occurs, I will feel tired and sleepy plus it will be around my normal bedtime so I will lay down to sleep. But then I start thinking about something and soon my brain is flying alone and I’m pretty much wide awake. Sometimes I go to bed with something already on my mind so the insomnia isn’t surprise, but usually the ‘killer thought’ doesn’t come to me until I’m trying to sleep and my brain has nothing to distract it.
To deal with it, I just get up after it becomes very apparent my brain is too wired to sleep now. Fortunately, other than the two years I was away for college, I’ve not shared a room since I was a child and could just get out of bed. I usually read, but depending on what is on my mind sometimes I will write down my thoughts. One time at college I had a really random bout of insomnia and for whatever reason I decieded to ride my bike around campus at 1am with the lyrics for “Circles” by Soul Coughing (“Sometimes I ride around in circles…”) stuck in my head.
The deceptive aspect is the worst part: 99% of the time it’s not that I don’t feel tired. I feel tired and go to bed only to wake up myself right back up.
Maybe I need to learn to meditate and do so before bed every night.
I found this extraordinarily touching, especially since I know that picnic table.
I’m rarely affected by insomnia, and I’m grateful. In the years since my daughter’s birth, I’ve become accustomed to waking up (and getting up) several times during the night, and I’m lucky to be able to go quickly back to sleep. Every once in a while, though, I’ll just lay there, awake, most often when the same thoughts or Tetris-like mind bugs circle in my head. I wouldn’t wish regular insomnia on anyone.
Ugh, yeah, I started having insomnia about three years ago, after I made some major lifestyle changes. Ever since then, I’ve rarely been able to sleep a full night without laying in bed awake for a few hours. I’ve done everything people tell you to do: exercise, stop drinking coffee, stop smoking, regularize your sleep schedule (so you wake and sleep at the same times every day). The only thing that’s _really_ helped is to start napping during the middle of the day. Now, when I am lying awake at night, slowly ticking down the hours until dawn, I think, “Ehh, I just need to power through the morning and then, come noon, I’ll get to go to sleep”. For some reason, I have no trouble napping during the day, so that works for me and has allowed me to get some measure of peace. At least now my insomnia doesn’t make me anxious.
Mine is usually of the busy-brain form, where I’m mentally anxious about something (I’m prone to anxiety, although therapy some years back helped some), or deep in the thinking-about-something like a project with a fantastic puzzle.
Exercise helped, and I sometimes am helped by melatonin or some Chinese herbs with a similar neuro activity (but less annoying to my stomach, but it’s still often a problem. The anxiety that I might have insomnia (say before giving a workshop the next day) is the most annoying–other times, it’s at best a mild annoyance, and I just read through it.
Physical pain rarely keeps me awake, it’s the emotional pain that’s hard.
Somulin was of a last resort product option for me, I have been dealing with sporadic bouts of insomnia for the past 4 years, and I just could not take all the horrible side effects that I experienced with some of the sleep meds the doctors put me on…and I have tried plenty of them. My doctor recommended Somulin to me as a natural alternative. I fall asleep extremely quickly and soundly! I’m not tired at all when I wake up and I use it every night. This product has literally changed my life. I bought it from http://www.somulin.com