The sweet momentary disappearance

26 November 2011 07:08 AM Categories: Insomnia | Writing prompts

painting Insomnia by Jen Bradford http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenbradford/2184559930/

We always want the things we aren’t getting. Sleep. Sex. The falling into something where you can lose yourself, can give up the vigilance, the waking life worries, the constant look-out for what will hurt, what will pierce the armor, will bring blood or tears.

For the last two years or so, I’ve been an insomniac. The form of my disease has shifted from crazy early wakeups to middle of the night wakeups plus crazy early wakeups. I can be in the middle of a dream, notice I am in the middle of that dream, note my deep sleep contentedness, and then: boom. Awake. Totally awake. For hours, as my brain does its thing and my heart pounds and the walls fall in on me. It’s debilitating. I am tired of it (ha ha). Sleep or the lack thereof becomes an obsession.

Sometimes my dreams are to blame. The most recent culprits have included one where I knew I was going to get caught for strangling a man years ago (my mother's take on this one: "Were you hot?" [actually, I was]; my therapist's take: "Tell me about getting caught," which was surprisingly fruitful), one in which a businessman with a shotgun was picking people off at a Metro stop and I had to protect the boy, and another one where I was about to give birth in a deserted hospital ward when a wizened old woman came up to me and asked "Have you got character?" (Yes, yes I do, I answered back.)

But it isn't just the dreams. It's me. It's that feeling that I have to hold on to everything, to contain it in my mind. It's the need to let go without the confidence that I can. What will happen if I stop being vigilant, if I stop keeping it together? What would happen if I left myself be vulnerable and open to losing myself to the night, to the forgetting of self?

I go to three separate mental health professionals, two once a week, one once a month (that’s my check-in with the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants). I dig out the essential remains of the past while honing my present, making sure that I don’t fall back into the abyss or sink into my own personal quicksand. Our couples therapist is the one who has decided to focus the most on my sleep, probably because it comes up often -- trying to have an engaging conversation after 8 p.m. with someone who has been up since 4 in the morning is not very satisfying. She’s great, she’s sympathetic, and she has been giving me sleep pep-talks.

So now I write down a list of things right before I turn off the light, things that my mind doesn’t need to work on in the middle of the night. I listen to a seven minute deep breathing meditation track and then I fall off into quiet. Three nights of this seems to be helping. I still wake up, but I am able to go back to sleep. I’m not calling it a sweeping success yet, but it is promising, a way to soothe my overactive mind.

As for the falling, letting twilight enter, letting the armor drop as daylight falls away...I'm still working on it, the vulnerability, the sweet momentary disappearance, the temporary dissolution of self.