SLEEP

For the first time in years, I can sleep. Sleep right through the night, uninterrupted, deep, regenerating sleep.

For the longest time I thought my inability to sleep was as a result of being a little overactive. From young, I was an early riser. During preschool years my mother would wake up to find me already at school. I would get up before dawn, wash, dress, make lunch, and then hop through her window since I couldn’t reach the door and was also concerned the noise of it closing might wake her. The trick was to get out unannounced – to be this stealthy, and ultimately considerate, would stand me in great stead in later years. I would get to school, the first kid there, and slide across the frozen dew – a boy ballet of blue eyed youth.

If there was no school, I would be thrilled by the silence of being around while everyone else slept in – Saturday mornings could last forever if you got up early enough, and you could be on your own if quiet enough. Living across the road from school, and also opposite a park, had a number of advantages. I could push my three wheeler out the complex, go some distance into the forest, and fire up the engine and tear about at will. I could watch Bond and Bruce Lee on the faintest treble of volume. So much to do, and so much time to do it, if you just get up early enough.

I always thought that’s where it started and to some extent it probably did – but in later years it became more and more of way of life, even when there was no reason to be up early. As a teen and student, I could get to bed at whatever time, in whatever state, and the same rule would apply – as the sun rose, so would I. Working career, no matter the deadline, I’d be up to start the day ahead of my peers.

This lack of sleep persisted throughout basically – to the point that I can’t imagine what it must be like to sleep the night through. I feel a sense of panic waking up without being aware of the first rays of light, and the thought of sleeping into mid morning would fill me with dread. Now that part, the dread, makes me wonder if its more than youthful optimism. At some point the opposite might have taken hold – perhaps a form of psychosis that has me terrified of losing time, of being less than I ought to, that without hard work I might surrender to sloth, go crazy and lose it all. Don’t laugh – there is some facetiousness in the extreme, but how else to explain the compulsion to constantly be awake when rest is needed?

The negatives far outweigh the positives. Anyone who has ever struggled with sleep will tell you that insomnia leaves you floating in a middle ground always beset by the shortcomings of either side. When you’re awake, you feel tired and need rest, when asleep you’re restless and a freight train of mental activity. You operate in a somnambulistic universe, constantly trying to focus yourself in the present moment – to feel grounded and weighted by the reality around you, not the anxious dreamlike compulsion to look ahead, be somewhere else, or even worse, just drop everything and come back to it later. Even dreams are fragmented and instantly forgotten, leaving a residue all too familiar – the panic of waking sending them fleeing like shattered splinters.

This impact on your concentration, which is little more than a focusing of all your energies in the exact present moment, is immense. So you try different things and one of the first for me was to push the compulsion to do things and to hope that the physical exhaustion might drag the mind down into the river of sub consciousness. Years and years of exercise though didn’t seem to help. I could swim marathons, cycle miles, climb mountains, nothing – the same impact, just a sense of feeling progressively more tired. And so it goes.

When a homeopath I trust recommended Melatonin at the age of 35, I was beyond the point of believing I could sleep. Imagine my surprise when on the first night of taking the little white pill, I past out only to wake up a few minutes after 7am – the sun a good way across the sky. Sitting here, a week later, writing, feeling sharp and acute, with a profound sense of time measured in clear moments, I start to feel the benefits of a healthy balance between the waking and dreaming worlds. Neither interfere with each other. I sleep when I’m tired and I wake when I’m well rested. When I’m awake I’m focused and active. When I sleep, process all unfiltered sensory experiences, clear all the unregistered nuances of the day, explore the infinite, dream deep and lose myself.

The cause is cortisol. A hormonal secretion linked to mental stimulation – it keeps you on your toes, alert to anything that might require you to lunge in any direction. Induced by stress and sport mostly, cortisol in good doses is a lifesaver of the most primitive kind. But constant ongoing levels of this in your system, brought on by anxiety and a fear of things yet to come, further propelled by rigorous over-activity, can steadily drive you crazy. And so the cycle perpetuates itself. You can’t sleep because you’re wired and alert; you can function because you’re drained, dragging a lifetime of unease, and tired.

It’s been a week. I’m becoming addicted to healthy sleep. I can nap in the afternoon. And wake up feeling rejuvenated. Although there’s no catching up for a lifetime of missed sleep, it feels like a good time to start.

(August 2009)