Ever have those nights? You want to sleep, you have to sleep, you really need to sleep…but your mind is doing a beer bong at a frat party?
No matter how hard you try, your mind is jumping from one bizarre thought to the next - gotta buy milk tomorrow, hey, who was the first person who thought of drinking something from a cow’s udder…and butter, how in the hell…and I should go on a diet…Diet…isn’t that a Japanese government…Japanese…who buys Walkmans these days…
…and you look up at the clock and see 3:34 and say, “I really have to get to sleep” and your mind says, “sex” and you think wow, there was that time when…and by the way maybe I should get up and pee…no, I don’t have to, well, maybe I do, no I don’t…oh look…a ship on the horizon…water everywhere…surf…tsunamis…water bill…checking account…
I was doing this mental-mishmash thing last night, too, and into the wee hours of the morning: Would it be scary for me to perform onstage? Will I go deaf someday from all the loud concerts I’ve been to? How much secondhand smoke from casinos have I inhaled? Why is it so hard to reach the folks at Video Professor? I can’t believe I saw a guy bring a parrot into the diner the other day. Aren’t those things unsanitary? I really should get on my balance ball, but first I have to pump it up a bit. I should be working on a new short story. I should be reading a book; I just got the new Stephen King and haven’t even glanced at it yet. I should clean out a bunch of stuff on the lower entertainment center shelves.
And so on.
*I also have the odd habit of waking up at exactly 4:20am even if I’ve been sleeping soundly up to that point. Always the same time: 4:30 frikkin’ a.m.
I do this to some extent, maybe 30 minutes on a bad night. Usually I go to sleep within 10 minutes, but there are those nights when I’m thinking…
How can my upstairs neighbor have sex for at least 6 hours every day for the past 6 months? How can they be doing it literally every single time I lay down in my bed, at night or for naps, no matter what time of day or night? Is it ever going to stop? Do they not get chafed? How come there’s the rule “i before e except after c” when half the time it doesn’t work that way? There must be an exception to that rule for every follower of it. It’s 11:00- what would posess someone to pull up into an apartment complex at 11:00 at night with their bass thumping like that? What is wrong with people? My back itches. My skin is so dry. Tomorrow night I’m going to take a bath with Aveeno and lotion up my whole body afterwards. This time I promise. And on and on for a little while until I give up and dive into the abyss of darkness that is sleep.
Oh, and on occasion I also do this (and I wonder if I’m the only one):
my chest hurts. Wait, is the pain slowly creeping down my left arm? Oh, I believe that it is. Okay, I’m having a heart attack. That’s it, this is the way I’m going to die. Right here in my bed. Tomorrow at some point my kids will notice that I’m not getting up and they will come in here and find me dead. I wonder what they will do- call 911 right away? Try and try to wake me up? Go through my purse and go to the 7-11 haha? Oh, but my house is not clean enough for me to die right now. To think of strangers coming in to get my body when there’s… dishes in the sink… and… I need to vacuum… and… zzzzzz.
It does seem that there are nights when you want to sleep but can’t, and the more you think about it, the worse it gets. What I’ve learned to do is to tell myself that it really doesn’t matter if I sleep or not, as long as I keep my eyes closed, that’s all the rest I’ll need. Seems to work for me. Next thing I know, it’s morning. Then again, I don’t need much sleep.
when this happens to me, i usually run through what i’ve done for the day. if there’s something i did and shouldn’t have done, then i run through the possible (and sometimes the impossible ones too) angles that could have played out until i go through all/most of them, determine where what i did falls on a ranking of how desirable those outcomes are/would have been. if my mind doesn’t go through these hoops, then usually i have some weird stream of consciousness type rambling montage in my melon; something very similar to what everyone else has already posted.
it’s like my mind has to defrag before i go to sleep. usually it does this in virtually no time. sometimes, it takes about 10 or so minutes. i’m a heavy sleeper, too. and it rarely takes me more than 10 minutes to fall asleep.
Well, you wouldn’t have if you’d just get to sleep like a regular person. That’s three times I’ve been round your place with the pliers just this month, and had to come away empty-handed. You know we’re not allowed to collect your toenails while you’re still awake!
Please: take a pill or something – some of us have quotas to fill.
I usually have bizzare thoughts a few minutes before I drift off. One night for some reason I thought my lizards were paralysed:
Poor boys. Can’t use their legs anymore. I’ll have to move them around and feed them. wide awake WTF? Where’d that come from…the lizards are fine…starts to drift off again…I suppose I’ll need to take them to the vet…surgery or…wheels…wonder how much that’s gonna cost…wide awake again Oh, whew, just a weird thought…I don’t really have to worry about money for the vet…starts to drift off again…maybe I can just carry them in a pouch around my neck…zzzzzzzzzzz…
I often start obsessing about things while trying to get to sleep. Especially if I fall into bed on a weekend night without being utterly exhausted. *Let’s see, tomorrow’s Saturday, so I’ve got stuff I can do all day … I should clean the kitchen, run the dishwasher, maybe clean out the coffeemaker, oh, and definitely check the fridge, I’m sure something in there’s gone bad by now. And then I need to get the bookshelves in the library put together and filled, and oh, I should take some stuff down to the storage room and it wouldn’t hurt to go buy cat food and laundry detergent … Okay. So, tomorrow morning, I’ll get up, start the dishwasher, take stuff down to the storage room on my way out the the car, go buy cat food and laundry detergent, bring the last bookshelf up from the car when I get back … *and so on.
Then there are the nights when I know I have to go to work the next day, and I decide the best way to get to sleep is to make up a little story in my head and maybe I’ll carry it over into my dreams. So, I internally write a little story that usually starts with me winning the lottery and before I can get to the part where I decide to take a grand tour of the entire globe and gleefully imagine all the hot foreign guys I’ll get to me (who will, of course, like me for my sparkling wit and girlish charm and not for my money), I’m thinking about possible tax consequences and who’s going to feed my cats and should I just sell my car and buy another one when I get back and I suppose I should put money aside for my niece and nephew and any of my own future children and why is it suddenly 3 a.m. and I somehow left out all the good parts of my fantasy?