You know the thing about insomnia is – you can’t bloody well sleep it off! Or is it the one real thing that you can sleep off? I’ve never really been sure about that, though I tend to lean with the first one.
I mean if it’s a condition whereby you can’t sleep…how can you sleep it off?
Sleep is a puzzling thing. I know there are all sorts of statistics about it – things for instance that tell us how many years of our lives we sleep away, but the thing I’ve always wondered about is sleeping patterns.
No, I don’t mean the latest duvet designs – I’m talking about the hours we each sleep and the things that affect us sleeping.
An old teacher I one had at school used to say he’d always been told it was ‘seven hours for a woman, eight hours for a man and ten or more for a pig!’
I always wondered where nine came into the equation, but was always too scared to ask him.
Of course these words of wisdom were directed at the time to myself and my classmates who were in our teenage years – since it was assumed that we’d spend half our time in our beds if we got the chance.
We might well have too, but you know on reflection I’m not sure if there’s much wrong with that sleeping pattern anyway, well at least in comparison to any other.
I mean if you think about it, when you are a little kid you might catch wee cat naps during the day but be roaring your head off all through the night.
A bit bigger and while you sleep a bit longer at night time – you still beat the sun up (and that means so do your parents).
A few years follow when it seems everything might slip into the ‘correct’ sleeping pattern but they soon slip into those lazy teenager years of long sleep ins at every opportunity.
And then not many years after that you could well find the whole cycle starting again if you happen to have small kids of your own and find that you are pacing the floor with them as they roar the house down, and then later discovering the joys of early morning television!
By the time they become teenagers you still won’t be sleeping at night – waiting now until you hear the sound of them coming back in again in the early hours of the morning!
Of course things are different for everybody, I mean some people I know say they can go with just ‘half a sleep.’ I could never figure that out either – I mean you either sleep or you don’t. How can you have half a sleep?
Still, on a recent occasion when I was troubled with late night noise and a sore back as well into the bargain, I’d have given anything for a half hour’s sleep – or even a half a sleep for that matter!
I tried lying on my back, on my front, on my side, on my other side.
I tried sitting and kneeling, I’d even have tried standing on my head if I could have managed it. In the end I just confined myself to jogging circuits of the living room in the hope that I’d eventually tire myself out and fall asleep.
Course it didn’t work, but after three nights I felt sure that I could have a shot at any marathon, if I could just keep my eyes closed for the whole 26 miles.
You know while that didn’t work for me I must admit that I have discovered that there are some fascinating ways in which some people find it almost impossible not to dose off.
Like kids in a car, or some people on a bus or a plane, or for some people watching late night tv.
On this occasion for me it happened to be a large injection and course of painkillers – but thankfully the steps don’t always have to that drastic before I can get some shuteye.
I mean sometimes I just get so tired that the sleep gets the better of me anyway
So for instance, I might be doing something like writing this and zzzzzzzzzz
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