My sleeping problems resurfaced within the past several months, but the past 3 weeks have been a nightmare. I’ve been trying to get back on a normal sleeping schedule but nothing works. If I can’t sleep I try to stay awake so that I can go to bed early the next night. Which you’d think would work because I’d have been awake for so long that I’d be so completely exhausted and sleep would come easy. At least that’s what I thought. Noope, didn’t work. One of two things always end up happening; either I hop into bed for awhile only to realise I’m wide awake and entirely incapable of falling asleep anytime soon, or I fall asleep for a couple of hours and then wake up again at an ungodly hour in the middle of the night. Regardless of which scenario occurs, I’m always back at where I started and try to stay awake and attempt it the next night, only to have it happen again. No matter how many times this happens, no matter how many sleepless hours I’ve built up, no amount of tiredness makes it any easier for me to sleep at night. And, on the nights that I can sleep, I end up going to sleep and waking up in the middle of the night anyway.
The hour I tend to wake up the most at is the 3 o’clock hour. Tonight, for example, I woke up at 3:33. Many times I have woken up at 3:00 exactly. Which scares the heck out of me because of The Exorcism of Emily Rose (people being possessed/tormented by demons would wake up at exactly 3:00 a.m. because that’s when demons would attack – a mockery of the Trinity and Christ’s death at 3 p.m.). Every time I have, I’ve wanted to get up and do something – go get something to drink, go eat, go read or write. Then I stop myself because, aha! I watch movies. I read books. I’m no stranger to dramatic irony. It’s the classic mistake; someone wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to get out of bed. You know something bad is going to happen. I know something bad is going to happen. The writers obviously know something bad is going to happen. Heck, even little kids know something bad is going to happen. Everyone knows something bad is going to happen. Everyone, that is, except the idiot waking up in the middle of the night who decides to get out of bed. So, being the ever vigilant movie aficionado I am (read: smarty pants), I instead stay in bed. Hiding under the covers. That is, until I get so restless & bored that “something bad” seems better than the utter horrendousness of nothing at all, which usually tends to be an hour or two (give or take an hour or two).
To my extreme dismay, nothing’s been working on the sleeplessness either. Benadryl & NyQuil usually always work. Now, they may make me tired enough to fall asleep, but I only ever sleep for a couple of hours and then wake up tired with my eyes burning. I spend a lot of time in bed, though I’m hardly ever sleeping. Really, it’s more me lying in bed just in case, because what if I get tired enough to go to sleep? I don’t want to get excited and then drop everything, run to my bed & hop in only to find out that that fleeting moment of sleepy vulnerability has been lost. That, and I figure that if I spend as much or more time than I normally would in bed were I sleeping then maybe my body will reap the benefits of sleep without having slept, or at least going through the actions of it will make it happen. So far, no luck. I’m going to keep trying though, because I’m running out of theories and in my sleepy state, my theory makes sense. Einstein believed in relativity before he could prove it, and darnit, I believe in my sleep theory. I may not be able to prove it right now, but it’s going to happen, just you wait & see.
Oh, and Happy 4th of July! Makes me wish I had Yankee Doodle Dandy to watch. 
You don’t get much more patriotic than that. “We’ll put ants in Hitler’s Japants!”
