So I managed to get to sleep last night, unaided and for a full seven hours straight. That was a big improvement over the last week, but problems sleeping are not unfamiliar to me. Sleep has always been a strange concept to me. We go lie down, close our eyes, and lapse into a state of unconsciousness for an unknown period of time. It lasts until either something disturbs our slumber, or our body just decides to wake up. What's more, we usually spend 1/4 to 1/3 of our time in that state, which has always struck me as a huge drain on our time. It is clearly necessary at some level, as it is easy to see the consequences of not getting enough sleep, but the amount needed varies greatly as we grow up. The requisite amount declines from all-the-time for newborns, to hardly-at-all by the early twenties, and then slowly increases throughout our adult life.
I have had trouble getting to sleep for most of my life. I may have spent as much time staring at the ceiling in bed as I have actually sleeping over the course of my life. I was the kid asking to get up and go to the bathroom or get a drink of water a hundred times a night, primarily because I was bored. I had an 8 o'clock bedtime growing up, and my Dad would usually watch TV until midnight, but I would hear him go to bed every night, and that didn't necessarily lead to me going to sleep. The only consistent exceptions to that problem have been times when I haven't been getting much sleep. So I am always either having trouble sleeping, or not getting enough sleep. I rarely got more than 4 hours of sleep any given night during my sophomore year of college, but amazingly enough, for the first time in my life, I was able to fall asleep within minutes of laying down. Past that point, lack of total sleep has about a 50/50 shot of allowing me to sleep easier, as opposed to preventing me from sleeping at all. These situations are usually a few weeks at a time when I am traveling, and working long hours.
As for why I have such difficulty falling asleep, I am not sure. First off, there was the obvious fear of not waking up. Parents out there: probably not wise for the last thing said, before you leave your kid alone and turn out the lights, to include: "...and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." (Because that will be the primary thing on their mind for the next couple of hours.) I have discussed that fear before, so it doesn't need to be re-addressed, but that clearly isn't the only problem, because I did eventually get over that issue, but still had trouble sleeping. Now maybe that just set me up to have a messed up sleep pattern for a long time afterward, but I definitely set new patterns in college and the problem has returned at times since then. My boss's theory is that my brain just doesn't know how to spin down, and admittedly many of my best ideas and solutions occur to me about 1am. That doesn't help me get to sleep though.
And then once we are asleep, there are dreams. Our brain must just be bored while our body is taking a break, and we aren't consciously limiting or steering it, so it goes to some weird places. While that may be one way that God talks to us, I have no doubt that it can also be a source of torment. When I was younger I would have the strangest nightmares on a fairly regular basis. Now that only happens if I get too hot, presumably my brain is overheating. Admittedly that is a much more effective solution from my brain's perspective, because I am now REAL careful not to sleep somewhere too hot. Mike, the guy who usually could care less about the heater or AC as long as it is somewhere between 50 and 90 degrees, suddenly cares a LOT more once its time to go to bed. "No we will not have the heater on all night! That's why God gave us blankets. Goodnight."
I am told we always have dreams, at some level, but there is the issue of remembering them. Back in elementary school, I used to dream entire days of my life before they happened, which can become an issue when you start to confuse memories of them with real memories. Maybe I still do dream entire days, I don't know, because I rarely recall any of my dreams by the time I wake up. On the rare occasion that I have some idea of what they were about, every bit of that is wiped away within a couple minutes, even if I concentrate on it. So if God is trying to tell me something in my dreams, the message is definitely not getting through. Anyhow, suffice it to say that: sleep is never something that has come naturally to me.
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