The Insomniac

Sometimes I suffer from insomnia and I have no idea why. I manage to get to sleep but, being a light sleeper I suddenly ping awake in the middle of the night and absolutely struggle to fall asleep again – until approximately two minutes before my alarm clock goes off for work.

I have tried several cures for insomnia and to be honest I find that a percentage of them work:

1%.

The vast majority of them don’t. I’ve tried them all.

Here are some that I have tried and that have failed spectacularly.

Reading

I love reading but I simply cannot read a bad boring book without ranting internally, something which fuels my insomnia. Sadly my favourite genres are science fiction, action thrillers and good old heart-wrenching blood-curdling horror; none of these work.

Science fiction sparks my imagination, something that is a true ally to insomnia.

Action thrillers have the same effect.

Horror books just scare the shit out of me and leave me lying in bed convinced that if I fall asleep a mad alien maniac will take me away and perform gruesome experiments on the most tender parts of my anatomy.

Drinking Warm Milk

Drinking warm milk does not work because the idea of warming milk was conceived in one of the more despicable think tanks of Hell itself.

Warm milk is disgusting and, if I were to survive the foul taste without vomiting, I would almost certainly wake up an hour later, desperate for the toilet and cursing because no amount of minty mouth wash can remove the lingering taste of rancid, stale warm milk.

Counting Sheep

Whoever thought that counting sheep was a good idea is an oddball. I have tried it but I find myself worrying about whether the field into which the sheep are so nimbly leaping into will be able to accommodate them. And then I start wondering why the sheep are jumping the fence into that field in the first place.

Is it a better field?

And why are they leaping over the fence one by one?

Is there a queuing system?

And are there an infinite number of sheep? There must be – because I have reached 2,345,203,334 – and there were still billions of the buggers left.

And what about the poor old sheep that can’t jump the fence?

Do they cry when they see the youngsters leaping over the fence, mocking their invalidity?

Also to be quite honest, I’ve never seen a sheep jump so I find the whole thing worrying and unbelievable.

And that fuels my insomnia.

Listening to Music

This has worked at least for a short while. I have a playlist on my iPod containing lots of mellow sleep-inducing melodies and they help soothe my raging insomnia. Sadly, even my mellow playlist contains a few, shall we say, more heavy numbers and invariably a loud blast of Judas Priest will wrench me from my slumber with maximum prejudice, making me leap out of bed in terror.

Writing a Novel in My Head

I have written around 2,532 novels in my head and they all have something in common – they are utter rubbish, so rubbish in fact that I beat myself up about how bad my ideas are and how, if they ever somehow find their way into print, people will ridicule my poor writing technique, my incredibly bad plots, appalling characters and extremely poor verbiage.

And that keeps me awake.

Lucid Dreaming

I’ve tried this and it doesn’t work. I can’t be aware that I am dreaming because when I am asleep I think I might be awake and when I am awake I think I might be asleep.  But I’m not. I’m either awake or asleep and not both awake and asleep or neither awake or asleep. The great Stan Laurel summed it up perfectly for me:

“I had a dream I was awake and I woke up to find myself asleep.”

Confused? Yes – I was and that kept me awake – or did it?

Not Thinking At All

This is impossible. I’ve tried meditation, clearing my mind of all things that might fuel my insomnia but when a random thought pops into my head I end up arguing with myself:

“Will you stop thinking about rubber chickens? You’re supposed to be clearing your mind.”

“I can’t help it. The thought just popped into my head and now I can’t get rid of it.”

“You’re a bloody arse! You can’t even do this one simple thing.”

“Leave me alone – now I’m stressed by your nagging and the rubber chickens are still there.”

Insomnia rubs its hands in glee.

Eating Cheese Before I Go To Bed

Cheese gives me weird dreams so I have tried eating a fair amount before going to bed. When I lie there in the darkness, I contemplate how magnificently bizarre my dreams are going to be and I look forward to them. Sadly, eating cheese before bedtime doesn’t agree with me and I end up having to get up to deal with a mild and extremely irritating bout of indigestion (see Getting Up later).

Hypnosis

I’ve tried hypnosis and this actually works. “Great,” I hear you cry. Sadly, Mrs PM recognises my trance state and has started suggesting things to me.

“You have an urge to clean the bathroom on a daily basis.”

“You hate rock music and consider Lady Ga Ga and Rihanna to be the pinnacle of music.”

“You have this desperate urge to spend money on things I want.”

Getting Up

I’ve heard that when you can’t sleep the best thing to do is to get up and watch TV or do something constructive. Sadly, TV in the middle of the night is so awful that I find myself ranting to the cats about the incredibly bland nonsense I am witnessing on the gazillion channels that I can see. I’ve tried writing a blog post – but that didn’t work either:

YOU’RE READING THE POST AND  I AM STILL AWAKE!!

The Light Sleeper

A few nights ago I had a weird dream. I was tied to the floor and a warm sticky substance was dripping relentlessly onto my exposed forehead. It was like Chinese water torture, only much worse; the dripping substance was slowly and inexorably drifting towards my mouth.

I can picture you reading this and I can almost sense the disgust in your mind but please bear with me - it's not as bad as you think (though it could have been).

As the drip approached my upper lip I started to panic; and as I panicked I began to hear an unearthly wailing sound.

And then I woke up.

Waking up for me is a traumatic experience sometimes because I am so short sighted that shapes take on a menacing significance. On this occasion, as my crusty eyes opened, I could see nothing. The room was dark and the feeble street light from the front window barely illuminated the room. And then I saw it; the blurred shadow directly above my head. My heart leapt; I almost screamed. And I’m glad I didn’t. If I had, a huge drop of cat saliva would have plopped right onto my tonsils.

“MIIIIAAAOOOWWWWW!”

Spike, our old, greedy, dribbling cat was perched on my chest, and howling for food. He was so hungry that he was salivating all over my head.

“URRGHHHH!!!” I screamed, and tried to turn over. Spike, thinking I was going to grant his wish for a tray of food promptly stepped onto my face before dropping to the floor, meowing incessantly. The racket was so loud that I decided to feed him. Because it was dark, I staggered out of bed, trod on Spike’s tail (causing him to screech in pain), bashed my knee on the bedside cabinet and hobbled downstairs. Spike, in revenge for the pain, tried his best to trip me up as I went. When I returned, Mrs PM was still fast asleep, oblivious to my trauma and pain. I was tempted to wake her up because it was her fault that Spike had woken me up in the first place. Why? Well, let me tell you a little bit of history.

When we moved into our new house we bought two black kittens called Jasper and Poppy and they were quite happy to sleep on our bed with us in it, in peace and harmony, moving only occasionally. However, when Spike, the cuckoo in our nest, arrived, he was so hungry all the time that he woke us up constantly at really anti-social hours. When I say “us” I mean “me". As you may have guessed, I am a very light sleeper and what annoys me most is that Mrs PM is the complete opposite.

I banned the cats from the bedroom and Mrs PM has struggled with this ever since I put my foot down. So to compromise, I foolishly allow them in the bedroom while we are reading, until it is time to turn off the light; then they are unceremoniously ejected from the room. On this night, however, Mrs PM had let the cats back in when I was asleep and, as usual, Spike had picked on me. Of course, he may have picked on Mrs PM first but waking her up is as difficult as trying to push a pea to London using just your nose.

Mrs PM can sleep through an earthquake – and indeed she has – twice! We don’t get earthquakes in England very often but Mother Nature decided to inflict one upon us last year. Being such a light sleeper, I was out of bed the nanosecond it struck. I was convinced that a burglar was trying to break down the bedroom door and in my confused semi-conscious state, I bellowed at the top of my voice, thinking that a burglar would flee if he thought that there was a maniac on the other side of the door. My screaming actually woke Mrs PM up on this occasion, as did the two hundred burglar alarms that immediately went off in the street when the tremor struck.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked in a bleary eyed state, before immediately falling to sleep again with a loud snore.

In these cold, dark winter months I can normally sleep quite well. It is dark when I retire for the night and stays dark until around eight in the morning. However, in the summer, in June in particular, it only begins to get dark at 10pm and by 4am it is light again and I find myself lying there in bed at 4:30 having been woken up by bright sunshine and the sound of the dawn chorus. I am so frustrated that I blame the cats for that as well. I’ve heard myself talking to Jasper:

“Call yourself a bloody cat? There are a hundred and forty two birds out there, making enough noise to wake the dead. Why don’t you round up the local moggy posse and sort the little buggers out?”

Jasper just sat there with that “Gimme food” look on his face.

When I complain to Mrs PM, she laughs and says “It’s not my fault you have transparent eyelids!”

Other things wake me up too, usually in the middle of a great dream. If a squirrel drops a nut in our front garden at 3am you can guarantee that I will be awake at 3am and one second wondering what’s making the racket outside.

I’ve tried wearing those blindfolds that they give you on aircraft. The problem is that I wake up with it still on and panic thinking that somebody has stolen my sight in the middle of the night, or find it missing and forget about it, only to rediscover it around my neck when I’m in the shower.

I’ve also tried earplugs with similar effects. Either I panic because I think I am deaf, or sleep through my alarm clock and end up at work two hours late.

Sometimes, Mrs PM can make matters much worse. She accuses me of being a duvet thief but the only person who wakes up on a cold winter’s night, shivering in the throes of early hypothermia is me.

Worse, she sometimes has a spontaneous, localised moment of being a light sleeper and suddenly screams out “What’s that noise?”. I get up, go downstairs, and usually find the cats having a party in the lounge, only to return to the bedroom to find Mrs PM snoring for England.

The worst thing about Mrs PM are her dreams.

Now I cannot read this woman’s mind but I certainly know when she is having a vivid and weird dream. Normally she cries out in her sleep, which immediately wakes me up. Sometimes, she wakes up, shakes me awake and asks a stupid question like “Why do the insects have to travel to Mars in a coffin? Surely the dentists will make them clean their paws first.” Then she falls unconscious again and starts snoring. I am such a light sleeper that her snoring keeps me awake for hours.

The worst episode involving Mrs PM and her dreams occurred the other week. There I was lying in bed in total bliss; I had caught the train to dreamland and was about to show my passport when suddenly Mrs PM kicked me. Furthermore, she kicked me so hard that I actually stumbled out of bed and landed on the floor. I was aghast. I woke her up and said “What the bloody hell are you doing? You’ve just bloody well kicked me!”

“Did I?” she replied. “I’m sorry. I was dreaming about a walking doll that wouldn’t stop chasing me; so I kicked it.”

And then she fell asleep and started snoring, keeping me awake for the rest of the night.

I need to take steps to combat my problem. How about ttaking these steps:

(1) Ban the cats from entering the room at all times when I am in bed.

(2) Buy a set of thick curtains that allow no light whatsoever to pass through.

(3) Soundproof the bedroom.

(4) Put Mrs PM in a straight-jacket.

Actually, I think one of those suggestions is a little extreme. I would cost a fortune to soundproof the bedroom.