So, our first sample post is this piece on insomnia by Fergal Crehan. By the way, did I mention that the articles are usually long. Sometimes quite long...
To Sleep, perchance...
Like many of you, I was not feeling my best last New Year's day. I spent most of it motionless, gaping at the TV, letting out wide, weary, teary yawns with increasing regularity as the evening wore on. I felt as if every muscle and bone in my body needed replacement, or at least a serious rest. I was, in short, exhausted. At about mid-night I decided that it was time for bed, and bid my flatmates and guests a good night. So I dragged my weary body into bed, confident that I'd be asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Unfortunately, I suffer from insomnia, and things are never that simple. Within an hour I felt no less tired, but a lot less sleepy. I was too hot, despite it being a cold night outside. I tried poking various parts of my body out from under the duvet, in an effort to cool myself down. This merely resulted in the exposed parts of me being too cold, while the rest of me sweltered on. Top half sweating, bottom half shivering, then vice-versa, I tossed and turned, before trying the same heat loss experiment along my vertical axis. Every now and then I'd glance at the clock, and see another hour gone by. Then I'd involuntarily do the sum: If I fall asleep right now, I'll still get five hours sleep, enough to get me through tomorrow. I tossed and turned a while longer, but still couldn't get comfortable. This wasn't good. I had work the next day, and needed my sleep.
Maybe a little soothing music?
Music is usually no good for sending me off; I enjoy it too much. Music with words in it is completely useless, as the words and melody are the core of the song, and I can't help following them. You need music that's diffuse, that doesn't have a centre you can latch onto and follow. The idea is to let it wash over you, not grab your attention. The keyword here is "lull". I went into the sitting room and picked up a CD of Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. Apart from being my favourite album ever, Astral Weeks is great stuff for lulling. Admittedly, it has singing in it, but Van's voice is more of a lead instrument in this context, and the lyrics are so enigmatic that you can let them go by as mere sounds. I settled down to my music, and began to feel...well, definitely a bit calmer. Alas, despite my serenity as I listened, Sweet Thing, Madame George, Ballerina and Slim Slow Slider all went by, leaving me as wide awake as they found me.
Milky drink?
I got up and went to the kitchen, poured a glass of milk, and went into the sitting room to drink it. I looked at the clock. If I finish this milk and fall asleep as soon as I get back to bed, I'll still get three-and-a-half hours sleep, which is crap, but better than nothing.
This, as any insomniac knows, is the beginning of the desperate phase of the night. You begin to imagine that by some sheer effort of the will you can make yourself nod off. Your calculations, once hourly, are now updated once every ten minutes. And the more you worry about not sleeping, the more awake you become. The problem is that you really truly are tired. Your eyes are sore from it, your body is screaming at your brain to give it a rest, but beyond tiredness, something's missing. At this stage, you would probably get to sleep quite easily but for your fretting about it all. Relief only comes when you realise that it's too late, you've lost. You do your final calculation, and realise that no matter how much sleep you get tonight, it's not going to be enough. It's like the moment when, stuck in traffic and already late for work (a circumstance insomniacs find themselves in with perhaps a little more regularity than others) you resign yourself to your fate, reasoning that if you're going to be late anyway, it's pointless worrying about the details. Your condition the next day rests largely on how soon you reach this state of resignation.
In my case it didn't come until very late, and I found myself lying in the morning half-light, listening to the birds tweeting, watching my alarm clock. Getting up to turn it off, I decided to phone in sick. This was not strictly true, but I reasoned that as I was physically incapable of work, albeit not as a result of a medical condition, I came at least within the spirit if not the letter of "sick". There would be no-one in the office for quite a while, and it was important that I phone in at the start of the day - phoning in at midday is seen as tantamount to a confession that you were drunk last night and have only woken up. Like many who have attempted to set an alarm for an hour ahead and had it go off ten minutes later, I made a mental note to buy a digital alarm clock. So now, as sleepiness finally descended upon me, I found myself trying to keep awake.
The sweet release.
By the time I made the phone-call I was so shattered that I sounded like a fairly convincing invalid. It was 9:30am. I made my way back to bed, the sun lighting up my room even through the curtains. I curled up in bed, and felt the world's most delicious feeling come over me. Warm and snuggly, perfectly comfortable at last, I felt myself sinking, sinking down into a warm enveloping darkness. I yawned, and tears ran from my stinging eyes onto the pillow. Had I been more conscious I might have thought about the harmonies on the line "Float upstream" in I'm Only Sleeping by the Beatles. Thankfully I wasn't, and upstream I went, blissfully and gratefully.
I have never found it easy to get to sleep, not since I was very small. Even on a good night, it will take me an hour in bed before I drift off. Now and then though, for perhaps a week or so, a bout of particularly bad insomnia will come hit me, and this is what happened to me on New Year's Night. For the rest of the week, friends suggested possible reasons and/or cures. One gave me a herbal remedy guaranteed to do the job. I gave it a go and fell into fitful, nightmare-filled sleep for ninety minutes or so before waking up bright as a button and staying that way till dawn. Another suggested a homeopathic solution. I replied that I had tried this already (I've tried most things) and found that any remedy you have to take four hours before going to bed seems to miss the point, namely that you don't know you'll have trouble sleeping until it's actually happening. Someone else suggested it was caused by toxins in my body. This seems plausible enough on the face of it - it was New Year's Day after all - but doesn't explain what kept me up as an 11-year old, or what keeps me up during the admittedly rare interludes in my life that could be described as clean-living. In the end nothing worked, except the usual expedient of waiting until the bout was over. Monday 7th saw something of a breakthrough, when for the first time in 2002 I fell asleep before 6am.
Counting sheep?
There's a loneliness to insomnia, a definite hint of the Dark Night of the Soul. (Scott Fitzgerald said that in the Dark Night of the Soul it is always 3am. Personally, I think 5:30am is nearer the mark, but perhaps he had earlier starts in the morning than I have.) With all that time on your hands and no-one around, your mind wanders. As a sleepless child, my mother used to tell me to think happy thoughts. Fair enough if you can manage it, but when you're already demoralised by tiredness and frustration, you are more often prey to unhappy ones. And all the time, the knowledge that you simply must get to sleep is there, the ticking of the clock never letting you forget it. Counting sheep is pointless, partly because it gets boring after the first few, and you begin constructing commando-style assault courses for your imaginary yews to negotiate. Mostly though, counting sheep just makes me feel stupid.
So where does it come from then?
In my case the most obvious answer is that my father also suffers insomnia, as I'm told did my Grandfather. No-one else in the family seems to have inherited it though, and my brother in particular has long been able switch off seemingly at will. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I simply don't like going to bed. As a kid I hated it, partly because of resentment that everyone else seemed to be staying up, and partly because I thought I might miss something. The latter is a feeling that has stayed with me to this day. Even sitting on my own in an empty house, I am loath to give up on the day, and will stay up far later than is reasonable, as if some form of excitement which I might otherwise have missed is just around the corner. When I do go to bed, it is often with a sense of disappointment. "Is that it? I would have hit the sack hours ago if I'd known that's all there was to the day."
The other little death.
Once in bed, I have no real appetite for sleep until that lovely sinking sensation descends upon me and I welcome it with open arms. Until then I view it with distrust, not wanting to surrender consciousness, as if wary of what might happen. Sometimes, I begin to drift off, a fact that I bcome aware of through my last remnants of consciousness. This knowledge shocks me back into wakefulness, often with a start - I'm not ready to let go just yet. Ultimately then, I am afraid of sleep. Despite the fact that I have gone to sleep and woken up thousands of times, I think I still am unconvinced that once I drift off, I will actually come back. On some semi-conscious level, I think I equate sleep with death. After all, isn't consciousness too important a thing to let go of lightly? You might as well be dead if you're not conscious, and what is death but permanent sleep? Every time I go to bed then, in a small way I confront my fear of death. Sometimes I come out on top and awake the next morning rested and relaxed. Other times I don't, and the morning sees me watching the clock with bloodshot eyes, waiting for it to ring.
by
Fergal Crehan
8:41:56 PM 
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