Sleepless nights

I appear to have lost the ability to go to sleep.  It's like losing a key; I have no idea where it is.  I rack my brain but can't find it. 

  I go to bed, but sleep does not happen.  I feel like Macbeth, or is it Lady Macbeth,  but without the guilty conscience.  On some occasions, I do finally nod off, waking in the morning to find I have migrated to some hitherto unvisited part of the bed with sheets and blankets tangled around me.  But lately, even this has eluded me.

  So I lie there, trying to think of something, anything, to divert my mind and coax it to release me.

  Sometimes I get up and have breakfast and then sneak back to bed.  This sometimes fools my sub  conscious for a time, not always. Or I move to another bed.  I open the window.  I close the window.  I turn on the ceiling fan; it get too cold; I turn it off.  I turn on the electric blanket.  Then I turn it off again. I go downstairs, lie on the couch, and turn on the television.  My feet get cold.  Alternatively, I feel hot all over.  Neither condition lasts.

  I am wide awake, and alert enough to do my income tax.  But I don't want to do my income tax.  I want to sleep.  I want to knit  up the ragged sleave of care.

Drifting away from sanity

During the past few months I have been plagued by insomnia. I tried to ride it out, but nothing solved the problem. Even sleeping pills just made me groggy. I truly cannot sleep four or five nights out of seven. It's making me crazy.

I decided to just ride it out, I figured eventually I will get tired enough to sleep naturally. Last night was a totally sleepless one, so I got up at 5 o'clock and tried to get something done. I resisted the desire to go back to bed, but went to the gym instead, doing my usual routine, but sluggishly. I was very tired when I got home, and my feet and legs were tired, so I lay down on the couch with a book. (Sometimes when I elevate my feet it relieves the tiredness. I'm a great believer in elevating the feet.)

I could feel myself drifting off, even though the air was hot and still. I woke up completely disoriented. I only knew I had been asleep a long time. My watch told me it was 5:30, but whether in the morning or the evening I could not tell. I looked at my phone and found it was still Tuesday. I was relieved. (I think.) Maybe not.

I could not help remembering a time, long ago, when I never knew what time it was. I was maybe 13. My family had just moved into a new house, my parents were separated, the house was horribly hot. I stayed up late, very late. I would be reading. Two o'clock would come, then three, and I would tell myself to go to sleep, but I wouldn't. I was reading P G Wodehouse at the time, I remember. I would wake up at 2 or three in the afternoon, feeling completely adrift from the society around me. It was unpleasant. More than that, it was frightening. I felt so separated from everyday life, unmoored from the ordinary life of ordinary people. Nowhere to be, nowhere to go. It was like being dead, but still alive.