Naps are for Woosies...

Or
Why I write incomprehensible Blog Entries...

My friend Karin live journals. She sometimes does this at 3am because she gets insomnia. Wicked bad insomnia. I'm filling in the adjectives because of the way I feel about sleep. I love being unconscious. Especially if my body is just, well, READY.

I battled with that semi-insomiatic state a couple months ago, the kind where you go to bed and then it's 10PM and you know because your eyes shoot open and look at the alarm clock. So you convince yourself it really is okay, no burglar or cucuy woke you, no gunshots, no prowlers, go. to. sleep.

And you do.

Until midnight, when you shoot up into a sitting position cuz HI, YOU ARE AWAKE! And the alarm is now reading 12:01 AM and you're still trying to figure out what woke you. Is the alarm going off? Is there a digital watch you don't know about? WHAT. Until you're set and try yet again to get some shut eye.

And you do.

Then it's 2AM and you are wondering why the hell your eyes are open and staring at the clock and did I see it go from 1:59 to 2:00 or was that me dreaming?

For. days. on. end.

I even had medical advice. Chamomile tea at night. No food after 6PM. A bath. Precious sleeping pills ($15 each, that's just wrong).

I did it all until my body got over whatever was wrong with it and I was unconscious the entire night. Yey sleeping through the night!

Except...you knew this was coming.

I don't rest all that much when I sleep. When I was basking in the realm of unemployment, in the span of 24 hours I'd be unconscious about 10-12. In that time of dream-living I'd get about 6 "good" hours of sleep.

The other 6 hours were dreams I'd claw my way out of to get away...not so much nightmares as ummm, bad painful, evil dreams. No reenacting SAW II or anything, more like some evil man yelling at me and waving papers saying I was never to set foot on a sailboat again! Or my mother in bed, too weak to get up and my brother and sister-in-law yelling at her cuz she's supposed to be taking care of their children. My dad, drunker than any skunk in the tri-county area driving my little brother and I to school, weaving in and around traffic. In other words, dreams that had me waking in cold sweats, crying, screaming, too pissed off to be asleep.

For the last 19 months my sleep has been anything but restful and peaceful, but I've been lucky. For the last 15 of those months I didn't have a full-time job to keep me from going insane with lack of sleep. I fooled myself into thinking I'm all better now, or something. I'm not, I just had the time to, well, sleep more. I'd make up for the lack of good sleep with more sleep. It all evens out in the end. Someone said it doesn't. I remember reading about how you can't "make-up" for no sleep or too-little sleep or whatever. LIES. Or maybe I should say, I CAN. If I can grab those extra hours. That's the new word to emphasize, IF.

IF I'm at my job site 9 hours a day, and IF I am commuting .5 hours in the morning and 1 hour in the evening, and IF I've actually been unconscious for 6 hours, theoretically I should be able to slip in some extra unconscious time. I haven't figured out how to yet.

Thursday I came home and dropped dead. The next thing I knew it was midnight and I was WIDE awake. Not a good sign. My body needed the sleep so badly I had no choice. I can't do that. I spent Friday on more caffeine than I am comfortable having in my system. Tea, hot chocolate, more tea, more chocolate...and one more cup for the afternoon. Nothing like a receptionist on stimulants!

I need to go lie down. I'm supposed to do something this evening and I'm almost dreading it as I'm just SOOOOOOOOOO tired. As I lay down for a nap...the phone rang. I swear, they're watching, monitoring breath and heart-rates. Oh OH! This one is slowin' down, time to di-al!

Right, I did say I was incomprehensible.

By the way:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SPENCER!