October 27th, 2009
What do you do when you have a sleepless night? Here is what I have been doing since about 3am:
1. Trying new positions in the vain hope that I will finally find one that feels good to all parts of my body simultaneously. I have these stupid arms that always get in the way.
2. Worrying about stuff.
3. Thinking about enjoyable things to get me off the worrying topics, which keep me up.
4. Thinking about relaxing things to get me off the enjoyable topics, which also keep me up.
5. Giving the internet another chance, after a serious let down earlier tonight. The one thing the internet promises is endless diversion so I get really indignant when I run out of stuff to do online. Maybe I should take up video games?
6. Feeling guilty about wasting time online and switching over to writing a cover letter. This completely undoes any progress on relaxing and being happy and lands me squarely back at worrying, because I do not have a job and I need one, and now I’m really fucked, so I might as well just get up and have breakfast.
Which in this case is half a cherry danish.
Sometimes I practice magic tricks in my head until I fall asleep. It’s distracting, time consuming, and can be pretty boring after a while.
Other times I count backwards from 100, and for each number I try to make out a random visual image from a combination of my imagination and the patterns of spots or light and dark on the inside of my eyelids. Once I start to see/imagine something simple (a food item, flower, animal, piece of furniture, building… whatever) I spend some time enhancing the details and filling out the picture in my mind. When I get bored with one image I clear my mind/view, count down to the next number, and try to make something different appear in my mind. The process is distracting, boring, and easy to drift away from at any point, ideally into sound sleep. I rarely count down as far as 90. Let me know if you can get this to work for you too.
I usually have a cup of neocitron, works every time!