SassyBlonde

Cannot sleep, cannot sleep. No yawning, just an acidy queasiness in the pit of my stomach.

There are times in life when sleep is an escape, and times when sleep is the haven of nightmares. Tonight, my mind fears the latter more than it longs for the former. This is the quandary I face in the week before a concert-- sleep more, play better? Sleep less, be more sane? I don't know.

There have been so many fruit-basket turnovers this past week. All of that insanity last weekend. Friendships dead on the vine for no good reason. New vistas opening up for my projects. And no escape, and no sleep, in sight.

My problem is that I have to have some small measure of peace to sleep well, and I have none right now. Every once in a while my body reaches a certain frequency where I know if head hits the pillow I just know I'll be doing calculus all night.

When I went back to school a couple of years ago (geez, was it that long?) I started noticing a really startling phenomenon-- when I went to sleep at night during a stressful period, I would simply live out a regular day in my dreams, usually doing some mundane task in my mind over and over and over. Most of the time, it was calculus problems. I would literally be trying to do my homework in my sleep and reach no conclusion even though my brain cycled through evolution after evolution of the dreaded problem. It got so I could recognize that state of mind before I ever went to sleep, and I think I sort of started avoiding it. I'd stay up later and later and later each night, until I'd finally fall asleep at some insane hour of the morning and wake up later feeling like I'd been hit by a Mack truck.

Something about the early morning dawn hours, maybe the light or the temperature or the quiet or just the exhaustion translates into a different kind of sleep for me-- more peaceful and unbroken than what occurs at normal hours. D jokes that I'm a vampire. I feel almost like a soul in purgatory, though.

Those hours between "bed time" and when I actually fall asleep are when all of my anxiety, all of my stress, manifests itself in jaw-cracking yawning fits of anxiety. I hold it off all day as I get my work done, but then it takes hold of me and fixates me on whatever my main focus is. I sit and surf and stare and can never quite get around to going to sleep, because I know on some subconscious level I'll dream of whatever is bothering me in one way or another.

Sleeping pills don't work-- they just trap me in the ether with the calculus demon. Working myself of exhaustion barely works, when I have enough energy to try it. Curling up with a cat is great, but it's a too-warm comfort these humid insane spring-summer days, and a waking one at that.

What do you guys do to fall asleep when it eludes you?