Insomnia Journal, 9/8/11, 11:32 PM
I
spent the evening working on a portrait of Mack and Carol for Mack's 70th
birthday. I worked on it earlier
in the day and was tweaking it after dinner. For dinner, we had hamburgers, and a vegetable stir-fry with
garden zucchini, mushrooms, spinach, garlic, carrots, bok choy, broccoli and a
little white wine. I had blood sausage in mine. After dinner, Keith got potato chips and sat on the
couch. I came over and joined
him. I ate more potato chips than
he did. L I am trying to break the habit, but
not hard enough! (I never liked
potato chips for many years--Keith taught me to like them, and it may kill me!)
Earlier,
I had walked over to Rolandale.
Keith drove over to check the phone connections, because I had ordered
the Internet for Rolandale through ATT (DSL). It was for my birthday and finally ordered it TODAY!
I
walked faster than usual, because I didn't want to keep Keith waiting, and I
was feeling better than normal, but
when I got there, he had opened a beer, so I walked 15 more minutes.
I
was very angry and frustrated when I left home because nothing was working
right on Tabitha. Tabitha kept
trying to restart herself in order to update some program, and was threatening
to restart while I was trying to work--I kept X-ing out the restart messages
and they just kept popping up.
Meanwhile, the picture of Mack and Carol I was trying to print did not
come out well because it was too small and I couldn't get the email to
work. I wanted to email the Psion
journal from yesterday which was a story for the word Disposition, which I
wanted to post for the WeekWord which is due Friday which is tomorrow. I wanted to get it done because I have
other things I need to work on like E's
book, Frog Haven, Story 16 etc. I was also upset about Graham wanting to
use one of the tents and about the possibility of his overhearing my objections
to that.
I
was feeling somewhat better after walking 45 minutes at a good clip and did NOT
have any fibromyalgia pain (which is very unusual!)
I
am writing these details down because I am up with insomnia and looking for a
cause of it.
At
dinner, we put on a new CD I had ordered, Carol King and James Taylor Live at
the Troubadour. It was a little
overly loud, considering we’d never heard it before and didn’t know if we’d
like it. After some potato chips,
Keith fell asleep on the couch. It
was upsetting me the way his head kept bobbing around.
Then
he got up, washed the dishes (thank you Keith!), and went to bed--it was about
9:00 and I went up, not knowing he'd gone to bed, expecting a story, but he was
already in bed. I am always
disappointed when I don’t get a story, but considering how early he gets up and
how hard he works, I try not to be too upset about it. I got my nightgown on and sprayed my
teeth with the water pik and brushed them, turned off the computer and read
MYSELF a bedtime story. I finished
The Cay, by Theodore Taylor. I liked it--I think it was a good book,
but something very sad happened right near the end and I cried.
I
sat on the couch a while to calm down and then went to bed.
As
soon as I lay down, I almost immediately started having weird "semi-hallucinations." I'm putting it in quotes, because they
were not really hallucinations, but dream-like images and sequences and talking
in my head. It was like I was
dreaming or having hypnogogic images, but I was not asleep. This happens to me fairly regularly and
is almost 100% associated with insomnia and seems to be an indicator or predictor--as
soon as it starts, I can guess I probably will not be able to sleep, and, in
fact, I lay awake for an hour in bed and got progressively LESS SLEEPY and MORE
WIDE AWAKE as I lay there, and also started getting "restless." I become agitated, and this agitation
that "forces" me to get up.
I feel as if I just cannot endure lying there another second. I feel as
if I will "explode" if I am required to lie in bed even another nth
of a second. I also often feel
"hungry."
When
I have the "Semi-Hallucinatory[1]
hypnogogic dreams" while still awake, I am fully conscious of myself, the
room, etc. The voices are not
talking to me, it's more like a TV show is running somewhere nearby (but inside
my head, not in Graham’s room, for example). At first, it is as if there are veils of darkness between
the “hallucination” and me.
Sometimes, I hear only voices, sometimes babbling in foreign
languages. Last night, there were
the voices, but, although I could understand the words, they didn’t always make
sense to me. First the voices, then
the images, dark at first, then brighter and brighter, like a TV warming up
(back in the old days, when TVs had to warm up.)
I
was trying to remember two of the little “visions” I had, but I can, at the
moment, only remember one. A man was passed out unconscious on the
beach or ground and a large bird ate his eyes out while he was still alive. This vision horrified me and “woke me
up.” Hard to do when I am already
awake, but I had been starting to drift and I startled into hyper-wakefulness
considering the horror of the “vision.”[2]
Tonight,
I got up and took 5 mg of melatonin and two valerians and then came down and at
a half-bowl of raw biscuit dough (with whole wheat flour and bran mix and rice
milk.) It's now been half an hour
since I took the pills, but I feel no sleepier than I did before. It's about par for the course, when I
feel this way; the pills rarely help much. Sleeping pills just make it worse.
What
I would have liked to do is two things on Tabitha: get the file I want and print the picture I wanted to
print. But since Keith is in there
sleeping, it doesn't seem fair to disturb him. If I had felt ok to do that, I would have skipped eating. I would not have come downstairs at
all, probably.
So,
what's different about tonight than last night?
*I
did not get a story read to me (though I did read to myself.)
*several
things upset me, somewhat more than usual
*blood
sausage? Garlic?
*I
walked faster than usual
*Potato
chips? Wine? (A tablespoon or two
in vegetables.)
*I accidentally had an extra high potency vitamin D and THAT could
be the cause! (But if so—it in NOT
the cause other nights, since, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never done
that before. (The pills stuck together.)
The problem is,
I have no idea. I can't see a
pattern. Keith thinks something is
wrong with me, with my metabolism or something, and that it is not something I
am "doing wrong." (I
worry I am causing the problem by some wrong choice.)
I
am concerned because lack of sleep causes many health issues, not the least of
which is fatigue:
*fatigue
*brain
fog, forgetfulness, stupidity, short term memory loss
*permanent brain damage
*heart
damage
*obesity!
*it's
associate with Alzheimer's and dementia!
:-(
*fibromyalgia!!!!!
*it
makes me logy and lazy, low energy, unable to function well, or work
*it
makes me cranky and grouchy and reactive in a bad way!
I am probably
going to go upstairs and lie down and try again to sleep. But I don't feel very hopeful. :-(
[1] I am calling
these semi-hallucinatory because they are not brightly colored and realistic
AND I am awake or at least partly awake—conscious,
[2] 9/9/11, This
morning when I woke up, I would have liked to have gone back to sleep,
considering how little sleep I got, BUT I thought about that “vision” from last
night, only this time, I saw it in another light. I realize it may only have been “wishful thinking,” at a
subconscious level, but it may also have been shamanic. I saw the
bird as a totem animal (like a raven, perhaps, although in the original
visions, the bird looked more like a large gull, but I don’t know any gulls the
size of a raven and it was larger than the average gull) who was investing the
sleeping MAN (not woman) with deeper
sight, such as spiritual sight, access to the unconscious and to the collective
unconscious, perhaps. I saw an
image of the man sprawled unconscious on the beach with the bird standing on
one foot on his shoulder, with one eyeball in his beak and one clutched in his
talons and a ray of light illuminating the man’s third eye. There was a symbol moving through the
picture, circle-triangle-eye, which located itself in the eyeballs, over the
man, in the sky, at the third eye of the bird, which glowed. I lay there wanting to paint the
picture. I wish I were a better
artist. I can picture exactly how
the man was lying, the composition of the painting, etc. The little mini-vision (it lasted a
very short time) relates specifically to the book I was reading last night
about a boy struck blind in a torpedo attack on his ship and stranded on a tiny
island where he learns from his companion how to “see.” However, the person in the vision was a
man, not the boy in the book and not “me,” unless it is the male part of my
being.
