The Nature of My Insomnia

To be unable to sleep is perhaps one of the most disquieting things that can happen to anyone. I lay in bed, just trying to keep my eyes closed for more than a millisecond just to suddenly realize that I am staring at the dark ceiling and that I have been now for several minutes. For me, it is the incessant chatter that is going on in my brain all the time, but most especially at that time when normality says we are supposed to be shutting down all but the autonomic functions and entering REM state and that wonderful phenomenon known as dreams. Now, I don't mean this in a psychologically distressing way (I do not suffer from Schizophrenia), but in the sense that I am contemplating one thing or another.

I remember when I was a kid this kind of night time seclusion was a safe haven for me and a place that I could go to escape many of the normal adolescent woes that have plagued humanity for time on end. Unlike my fiancee, I have never had the ability to go to sleep at the proverbial drop of a hat. Instead of drifting blissfully off to sleep, I think about one or more of thousands of different topics. I think you can get the idea of just how crowded it can get at times; sometimes I think in detail about books I've read and what may have happened after the last page, or I think about world problems and how I am impacted on a daily basis, or I think about a story that I am considering and how best to turn the storyline, or I quite simply think about the future that Jess and I have in store for us.

The point of all this rambling is that all of this is going on in my mind which makes it very difficult for me to get to that level of personal comfort necessary for my mind to enter the sweet oblivion of rejuvenating sleep. On a sidenote, the fact that I am continually sore these days from excessive use of the Wii (!) is definitely not helping. Additionally, the fact that I will soon be leaving Jess for New Mexico is weighing heavily on my soul and, even though we both know how necessary this degree is for my future, I find myself wishing that it was next year at this time so that we could, finally, start our life together and really start planning our wedding.

Unlike many people, I am sometimes more comfortable wallowing in my own personal reveries than spending too much time with other people in idle banter and conversation. The unfortunate downside to this is that my mind is constantly in overdrive. I pray that with school comes a kind of scheduling that will allow me to go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time day in and day out. After a few weeks I should be getting to sleep with very little difficulty.