I LOVE sleep. LOVE. LOVE. LOVE IT. I sometimes wake up in the morning and already look forward to going to bed that night. However most nights I can't sleep. It usually takes me a good 45 minutes to an hour to fall asleep and a lot of nights much, much longer. When I do fall asleep I often toss and turn and wake up during the night unable to get back to sleep. You may think my children might be waking me up in the night, although you would be wrong. My children sleep like angels. If only I could sleep like they do!
I go through weird cycles where I can't sleep hardly at all for a few nights or more in a row and then I do occasionally have a great nights when I sleep really good. But those are usually far and few between. I admit I am a high stress person and it's hard for me to turn off my brain when I am trying to go to sleep. My mind keeps going and going and sometimes it gets me all worked up. I usually don't get up and try to do something else. I just try, try, try to sleep, in the hope that I will finally drift off to dreamland. Did I mention that I LOVE sleep? I really do. It just doesn't seem to love me as much. Some nights I will get up and try to do something productive but usually I just lay in bed hoping to fall asleep.
I can pinpoint my Insomnia to two separate events:
The start of my insomnia began in 1994 when I was a senior in high school. The date was January 17th at 4:31 a.m. to be exact. I lived in Southern California and one night (actually early morning) we had a bad earthquake in Northridge, which was about 30 or so miles away. It was a 6.7 on the ricter scale which doesn't sound that big, but they say that the ground acceleration was one of the highest ever recorded instrumentally in an urban area in all of North America. I woke up that morning in a complete panic with the bed shaking (hint: never own a water bed in an earthquake area), pictures falling off the walls, glass shattering and crashing noises.
After that night I couldn't sleep. I was terrified to go to bed. I could take naps when it was light out but at night it wasn't easy. I got on some sleep medication prescribed by a doctor and that helped a bit until my body got used to it and then I was back to square one. It didn't help that during my insomnia I moved away from home and went to college. Having a roommate (although I loved them dearly) didn't help with the sleep issues. I am a super light sleeper to begin with so every little noise would wake me up. That is when I started using ear plugs and I invested in a noise machine that made white noise to drown out the little sounds, which helped some. (I still use earplugs but Chris has weaned me from my noise machine, WHAAA!)
The second event occurred my first night out of the dorms. (Mom, if you are reading this you probably should just skip this part.) My friend Christy and I moved into an apartment off campus with two girls we didn't know. One of the reason I choose this apartment was because we all had separate rooms and I thought it would help me sleep better. In the transition of moving in Christy and I choose our rooms. One of the girls who was moving out was leaving the next day and had all her stuff packed up. Her room was the room I was going to live in so she was nice enough to sleep that night in a different room since the other two girls who were moving in weren't coming in for a few days. So I moved all my stuff in and got settled. I was so excited to have my own room and my own quiet sleeping space!!! In the middle of the night around 2ish maybe(??) I opened my eyes, and standing over me was a very tall, very big man (Mom, I told you to stop reading, I probably NEVER told you this, obviously for good reason!). I was TERRIFIED!!! He was whispering the other gals name whose room this was before. In a weak, frightening voice I said, "I'm not her." Instead of leaving right then he proceeds to tell me that he came over to say goodbye to her since he was leaving to go home and knew he wouldn't see her in the morning. How he got in, I don't know. Did he have a key??? Was the house door unlocked? He was talking to me like we were in a complete normal situation and asking me my name and such. Lovely, could you please get out of my room!!!??? Needless to say that didn't help my insomnia issue. In fact I still have issues with that experience and often if I go to bed before Chris does and he comes in the room I wake up in terror and scream. I also have a little OCD about making sure our doors are always locked!
I seriously need therapy. Good Night. Or not.
