Insomnia

Now I know what reading philosophy for 14 hours a day does to me. It prevents me from going to sleep.

By the time I finished the last reading yesterday I was ready to fall asleep. But no – instead, after I’d tucked myself in, I decided my brain needed something light to snack on to shut it down a bit. So I pulled out a Harry Potter book and began reading. I usually fall asleep after a couple of pages, but not last night. It was almost 2am when I started reading, and when I’d read one very long chapter it was nearly 3am, and I’d been nodding off quite a bit, so I figured all I had to do was turn my light off, roll over and sleep would come. Alas, no such thing occurred. I lay there for ages, turning over and over, mind spinning, eyes tired, body restless. In the end (what must have been after 5am) I just gave up and lay there, motionless, thinking about everything and nothing.

I must have dozed off at some point, but I’m well aware of how uneasy that ‘sleep’ was, and the next time I checked the time it was 8am, and my empathic flatmates were laughing, talking and playing music right outside my room. No point in trying to get some sleep then, in other words. I got up before 10am, feeling more like a zombie than I’ve ever done before an exam or an important essay is due, because on those occasions at least I tend to get a good 4 hours’ sleep.

If I were to look on the bright side of this, I’d say that it proves how alert my mind has become due to recent efforts to stir things up in the upper story. Now to try to find the median point, so that my brain actually takes a nightly break. Yeah, that’d be nice.