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!!

Night Noises

Certain things invade my subconscious mind and return to bite me on my arse, usually in the middle of the night.

The other night, I was laughing at a documentary on TV about people who were convinced that they are constantly being abducted by aliens. As my conscious mind mocked these poor unfortunate wretches, their words somehow bypassed my mental firewall and occupied a deeper subconscious level of my brain.

It was like a time bomb waiting to detonate.

I am a light sleeper and can be woken up very easily (too easily!) by noises in the night. With three cats lurking around, I am often dragged from my slumber if they decide to scratch the carpet, fight with each other or simply turn over and start snoring downstairs. Suffice it to say, any other noises such as passing cars, people chatting as they walk past my house  and, in fact, my house itself, when it decides to creak or squeak, are enough to wake me up.

And, of course, when I am asleep, my imagination runs amok within my head, leading to bizarre and sometimes disturbing dreams, which unlock doors in mind full of seemingly inane drivel that has been registered there during my waking hours.

On the night I watched the documentary about alien abductees I was having a particularly vivid dream and the words spoken in the documentary suddenly exploded within my mind:

“I woke up and saw a grey alien standing at the foot of my bed; and then I was taken.”

Something woke me up. It was probably Jasper, my fat cat, snoring downstairs. It could have been anything.

All I remember is waking up with the words “grey aliens at the foot of my bed” ringing in my ears. I sat up and stared towards the end of the bed.

One more thing you need to know about me – I am as blind as a bat without my glasses.

Another thing you need to know about me – I do not sleep in my glasses.

What does this mean? It means that whenever I wake up, particularly when it is still dark, I am confronted by weird shadows of black and grey, together with other shapes that my eyes simply cannot recognize. Sadly, my imagination steps in where my flawed eyes have failed.

The weirdness of my dreams has allowed my imagination to run riot and invade reality. Suddenly, each shadow is menacing; each shape is an unspeakable horror.

What IS that thing at the bottom of the bed?

SHIT! IT’S AN ALIEN!

When I switched on the light, the anguished cry still echoing around the room, I groped for my glasses and discovered that “the alien” was a wardrobe that I have had for ten years and the only unspeakable horror was the anger of a very irate and very tired Mrs PM who was about to beat me back into unconsciousness for waking her up.

Night noises, for me, are a royal pain in the arse – sometimes literally when Mrs PM kicks me after I have woken her up thinking monsters are invading the bedroom.

It’s not always slavering beasts that I imagine are in my bedroom intent on devouring me. Such incidents are rare. My problem is that when I am woken up by a creak in the house I immediately think that there is something wrong and, since Mrs PM is in deep sleep and completely oblivious to my trauma, I am alone in my disturbed little world.

I lie there wondering whether the noise downstairs is a cat sharpening its claws on its scratch post or whether an axe murder is creeping up the stairs to dismember me.

There have been occasions when a night noise has been significantly loud enough to wake both of us up. Each time we have had a problem. Both my imagination and Mrs PM’s imagination collide resulting in us both scaring each other half to death.

PM: “Wassat?” 

Mrs PM: “It’s an axe murderer creeping up the stairs.”

PM: “An axe murderer? No it’s not – we’re being invaded by aliens that want to stick things in my nether regions.”

Mrs PM: “Oh – it’s the bloody cat scratching at the door for food.”

Believe it or not, we have been woken up by earthquakes. Yes that’s right – earthquakes in Manchester. The tremors were tiny but just powerful enough to scare me shitless each time.

The first time was just after we had moved into our current house. We were in the middle of redecorating and as a temporary measure, Mrs PM had propped a mirror against the window while the walls were being prepared for plastering.

When the earthquake struck, the mirror rattled against the glass and promptly fell onto the floor. I woke up imagining that scene from ‘Salem’s Lot where the vampire was hovering outside the window scratching to come in. I was halfway out of the bedroom, squealing like a little girl before I heard Mrs PM say:

“Bloody hell – that was an earthquake. It’s knocked the mirror over.”

The second time, the tremor was a little more powerful and this time I was woken up by the door rattling in its frame. To me it sounded like somebody (a mad axe murderer?) was trying to open the bedroom door. This time, I must have been dreaming about being a super hero because I leapt out of bed and, with the dream still present in my head, I pulled open the door and ran out onto the landing screaming like banshee, ready to annihilate whatever was trying to get in.

What made matters worse was the cacophony of car and burglar alarms, caused by the tremor, blaring out in the street in perfect chaotic harmony. As I stood at the top of the stairs in pitch blackness with the remnants of the dream vanishing I was filled with a sudden dread that this time, finally, there really was an axe murderer in the house.

I ran back into the bedroom, slammed the door and was about to dial 999 when Mrs PM, once again the voice of reason, said “Blimey – was that an earthquake?”

We also had a problem with Liquorice, the hellcat, when she first arrived. Our other two cats are either too lazy (Jasper) or too scared (Poppy) to climb higher than the settee. Liquorice on the other hand is small, slim and very agile and set about exploring her new home, usually at three o’clock in the morning, by leaping to the top of the bookshelf, kitchen units or anything that was above head height, just to see what the view was like.

The result? Yes – that’s right. The burglar alarm went off repeatedly, causing me to either squeal or thunder downstairs with a blunt instrument and racing heart to confront the alien or axe murderer that had invaded our home, only to find a hellcat laughing at me from the top of the bookshelf.

At least we have solved that problem and adjusted the alarm sensors to cope with Liquorice’s lofty territory.

Now, all I have to worry about are those little noises. I wish I was like Mrs PM, a woman who could really sleep through an alien invasion.

A deeply disturbed part of me hopes to see a real grey extra-terrestrial with a ray gun and an anal probe standing at the foot of the bed pointing at me.

At least then I’ll get the last laugh when I wake up Mrs PM.