Insomnia …..

The official definition of the word

/ɪnˈsɒmnɪə/ – noun – habitual sleeplessness; inability to sleep.

My definition

/@#$%&/ – swear word – the inability to turn the brain onto mute.

Why after sleeping like a baby – all of a sudden it is twisted sheets and desperation at ungodly hours of the night?

As a child when we complained that we couldn’t get to sleep, my dad used to sit at our beside and talk us through the process of letting your foot go to sleep and working your way up the body – invariably he never had to get further than the knees, but somehow as an adult this no longer seems to work. The brain kicks and fights against itself – it does not want to go to sleep.

I have also been advised to use reverse psychology – instead of lying there in angst trying to fall into dreamland,  lie there and be determined to stay awake.  But this gets boring and then the electronic device holds a pull and that, as we all know, would make any future ideas of sleep die a slow death.

But lying there in the wee dark hours one morning, with a tumultuous storm thrashing about outside, got me thinking.  How many beds have I lain in during my lifetime? Trying to run through my life and remember everywhere I have laid my head and then mentally teleporting myself to that actual bed – and eureka I was asleep!  It was quite an uncanny feeling of imagining oneself in the actual bed, the feel of the sheets, the noises outside, where the windows are, the doors, the colour of the curtains and literally feeling yourself lying physically in that bed again.

In typing this I realise that some beds you may not want to remember, so for the purpose of this exercise – don’t!

Have I unwittingly stumbled across a possible remedy for insomnia instead of the common counting of sheep?