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Awake

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You know when you have nights with irrelevant crap whizzing round in your head so you can’t sleep? That.

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  2. Good idea. I kniw that in the end the only option is to get up for a but and let the brain cool down. The alarm goes off in 2 hours and I have a 2 hour drive to work. Living the dream, eh!

  3. I’ve just had one, mate. Hence me being on here at five in the morning.

    I’m an editor by trade but out of [my proper] work for eighteen months. So I’ve been delivering online grocery orders for a leading supermarket since last November to keep some pennies coming in. It’s tough, but I’ve been quite enjoying the physical slog, something I’ve never done before. It’s the mental side I wasn’t expecting. I only do it two nights a week, but after pretty much every shift I am extremely restless and often virtually sleepless, even though I’m tired. The problem is I am redoing my delivery round in my head, from start to finish, over and over, and there is always one “drop”, somewhere in the middle, that I can’t remember, unless I go downstairs and browse on Streetview.

    What a sorry state.

    Good morning, anyway.

    • Just a thought, but is it possible to keep a map of your route as you go along, either electronically or on paper? Then you could check when troubled thoughts hit and perhaps get some rest.

    • Hi Madfox – I had 2 spells of home delivery for a supermarket whilst looking for my proper job and like you enjoyed the physical side of it (once the back adjusted). I found that putting the new address in the satnav once I had finished the previous delivery and crossing out the previous delivery on the manifest, was the way to go. I was mentally letting go of each address as I went round.

    • Thanks for the feedback, guys.

      Sometimes they give us a map of the route, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t seem to make a difference either way, to be honest. I do seem to “mentally let go” of each address as I do it, but they all come flooding back when I can’t sleep later on that night – it seems to be my go-to thing to fret about! It’s just the way my mind works. On sleepless nights when I haven’t been doing the deliveries, my brain chips away at something else.

      • Well that decides it for me, I have an interview with a well known supermarket chain for the job of part time delivery driver. I thought something to do in my retirement and of course the extra cash, but fuck it I`ve just phoned them to tell them I`m not coming. Sleepless nights. potential back problems – no way. I think some voluntary work beckons.

        • I must say, if it was truly just “something to do in retirement”, you’ve made the right decision to back out. It’s not worth it, my friend. I can’t speak for them all, but if it’s the orange one, their schedules are just too tight – you lose five minutes doing refunds and you will never make that time up and will be late for other customers. If you don’t need the money, your time will be better spent volunteering for a worthy cause. Best of luck.

  4. Morning all,

    I’ve been up since four; wake at 3/4 every morning- 2.30 am last Friday, blimey. A sorry state, indeed.

    Anyway, plenty much caffeine for all. Hope we all get a better night tonight.

      • This is the story I wrote this morning. In a way, it too is about troubled sleep.

        It was the copper sky which first drew my attention.
        I was standing at my front gate, staring across the recreation ground. I knew I shouldn’t have been there, not on my own. It was the middle of the night and I was five years old. But this was, after all, a dream. So I stood and stared at the sky, which glowed a vivid orange-brown, streaked with cables of thick grey smoke.
        I stepped across the road. There was no traffic, there were no people, this was a thoroughly empty scene. I went through the park gates and stood in the middle of the playing field. Now I was closer, I could see the vast bulk of the church, the church which I walked past every day, my hand clenched inside my Mummy’s, on my way to school. But the church was too dark, even in a dream night-time. It was charred black, it was smouldering. It was, it occurred to me then, the source of the smoke.
        There was a jump-cut in my vision and suddenly I was there, in front of the great church doors, my little head tilted back to gaze up the vast height of the spire. There were two spires where there should have been one. My heart pounded so hard, I feared it might stop. My hair, which for no accountable reason now reached down to my shoulders, blew violently in a hot wind that emanated from a vast tunnel in the side of the west wing. Into this chasm, there was embedded a white train, crushed and mangled, and its passengers were made of flame. The railway track had somehow been diverted from its embankment, through the graveyard, and into the side of the church.
        I looked up again to the tips of the two spires.
        It was the two spires that disturbed me the most. Even inside the dream, I was already being haunted by the two spires, the two where there should have been only one. It made no sense to me.
        When I awoke, in a sweat, the inside of my head felt flooded with blood. It took a considerable effort to slow my breathing.
        I lay, trying to calm myself, for several minutes. This was the morning of 13th September, 2001. Two days earlier, the world had become a different place. New York was still reeling. I did not need a psychologist to interpret this dream for me. It had taken hold of my current fears for my family, for our future, and at the same time tapped into old childhood anxieties.
        What chilled my heart and boiled my brain was the fact that I had first dreamt this dream when I was five years old, forty years before those planes flew into the Twin Towers. It was the devil that raddled my sleep until I was at least eleven, when at last it began to fade from my night-time experience. Now, its sudden return would floor me for days to come as I struggled to accept the new climate of fear in both my waking life and my dreamworld.
        The five-year-old me, I know, had not predicted the future – that cannot happen. But for a while it truly felt that way.

        • Nice piece Foxy. A dream is the weirdest thing, is it not. Why did I dream about that person who has knot even entered my thoughts for 20 years or more? Just plain weird!

          • Good account, madfox.

            I remember my dreams every night and right them down- batshit crazy, every one. Grrr.

            I keep my phone on which is a big problem; but I can’t rely on my alarm clock and so I need two alarms (get a new alarm clock, I hear you say).

            Keeping the phone on is dreadful- I know a few night-owls so there’s always the possibility of a message/email to look at which obviously can’t wait until morning . Duh.

            So whenever I wake up (which is frequently) I just have a quick check….terribly destructive of sleep.

              • Yeah, I do….I think it’s a fear of sleeping in, so I have two alarms, but since I always wake so early that’s hardly likely.

                I had a DAB one but could never set it properly and you either had R4 Farm Hour or whatever the hell it’s called at full blast or some God-awful beeping that I could never work out how to turn down. So for the sake of neighbours and the rest of the house I switched to a normal clock, which is quite unreliable, and so back to the phone/clock combination (which necessitates leaving phone on, hence the midnight phone-checking.)

                Wow, in the history of my long and tedious stories posted on here, that takes some beating. 😀 I might re-read it when I can’t get back to sleep.

              • I use my phone if I’m away but at home I have ye olde clock alarm which works fine. My phone occasionally eats its entire battery over night for no apparent reason and I’d be worried it wouldn’t go off. Also, I don’t want a phone by the bed. Dunno why, I just don’t.

          • Talking of plain weird, and of the attack on the World Trade Center…

            My father died on 11 September 1995, six years before 9/11.

            My wife’s father died on 11 September 2007, six years after 9/11.

            Ridiculous symmetry, eh?

            • That’s very strange….you must feel weird when the date comes round? Or perhaps you feel the symmetry is now, uhm ‘closed’? (Sorry, geometry not my strong suit.)

              I often dream of people out of the blue; then the next day I get an email. And then other odd co-incidences subsequently happen. I say ‘co-incidences’ as that’s all they are in my case, I’m sure- but it does give one pause for thought.

              • Yes, 11 September is a big date for us, for sure. But you’re right – nothing significant happened on that day in 1989 or 2013, so that’s where the symmetry ends.

                I had a dream the other night where I was at work in an office and someone told me to look at a website called Porcelain 4, because it was a porn site which was “untraceable”. I don’t remember what happened next in the dream, but the next morning I googled “porcelain” and clicked on images. The first three pages all showed pictures of porcelain – cups, plates, etc. The fourth page showed images of porcelain too, except for one picture, which was an erotic photograph of a scantily-clad woman.

                • Yes it’s very strange when things like happen. I like to think the Universe is telling me something but I think it’s actually a version of confirmation bias/cherry-picking and wishful thinking (in my case, anyway!)

  6. About eight years ago I suffered from chronic insomnia which lasted for best part of two years and re-occurs (albeit mercifully briefly) every now then if Im stressed or sometimes for no obvious reason.
    I found after trying every ‘cure’ known to man that the best thing was to stop worrying about it (easier said than done mind) and realising that a) lack of sleep doesn’t kill you and b) you actually get more sleep than you think you’ve had . These days if I get 4 hrs + uninterrupted then, to quote Ice Cube, it was a good day .

  8. Never slept well really since I was small. Quite scary watching my 6 year old son having the same sleep patterns. I still have bursts now, but nothing like when I was younger, I can manage it, even control it a bit better.

    Anyway, tips from 40 odd years of bad sleep.

    1. If you’re doing any brain engaging stop at least an hour before bed. No guitar playing or songwriting/recording during that time. Give your brain’s network time to simmer down.

    2. Ditto any exciting tv/anger inducing tv. No Question Time!

    3. Cut down on booze consumption, and if you’re a smoker this too. Snoring, breathing problems caused by booze/fags, all help wake you up, if you’ve managed to drop off.

    4. Go to bed at a reasonable time. Do this regularly. Train it. If you can’t sleep, get up, but don’t do any of the things above. Sit quietly, maybe have something to eat. Sometimes sleep is interrupted because you’re hungry. Carrot sticks or something similar, not anything fattening!

    5. Do not switch on the tv, computer, phone, guitar amp, anything.

    6. Irrelevant crap whizzing around your head? Brain dump. Write it down. Your brain doesn’t think it’s irrelevant or it’s caught in a crap loop. Writing it down gets it out, calms your head.

    7. Most of all don’t worry about. If you stress about being awake you’ll stay awake.

    • You can only do three things in bed:
      Sleep
      Read.
      Sex.

      No TV, computers or anything like that.

      I was discussing this with my Doctor on my annual sleep meds check in. I observe, religiously, all the good sleep habits. No meds – even after extended drawdown period – means no sleep. She told me that some people are just like that, and if the pills help…

  9. The Sleep with Me podcast is worth a go – http://www.sleepwithmepodcast.com/

    The guy attempts to bore you to sleep, and, for me at least, succeeds. Not sure if this would have worked in my own insomniac years, which were the result of a hideous jobsituation. I would get to sleep OK but wake early (about 4 am on a ‘good’ night, about 1:30 am on a particularly bad one). Don’t they say that difficulty getting to sleep is likely to be stress, but difficulty staying asleep is likely to be depression? Sounds right to me.

  10. I have sleep problems too, sleep apnea. Booze is absolutely the worst thing, best thing to give it up at least on week nights (inc Sun).

    Another way to help you sleep is some er.. intimate physical activity, and you don’t need a partner …

  12. With me it’s not so much a getting to sleep problem. I can fall into the arms of Morpheus within minutes of my head hitting the pillow. It’s waking up at ridiculously early times that plague me.
    It doesn’t seem to matter what time I go to bed or how tired and sleep deprived I am I awake fully alert around five or five thirty most days. I write most because every now and again it’s even earlier. Three or even two o clock is not that rare.
    I’d love a lie in now and again but it’s a forlorn hope I’m afraid.

    • That’s my problem Pencil, I have no problem going to sleepbut I wake up 4ish and if I don’t get back to sleep it’s a disaster. To be honest, if I didn’t have to go to work I’d just get up and have a nap later. What I did in this case was give up on the idea ofgetting up at 6 and slept solidly till 8.30 and came in a bit late. There was a conference call at 10 which I dialled into and drove in on clear roads while they droned on in the background. I think on this occasion it’s because I have a bout of manflu and have been feeling crap anyway. As SimonL says, grog is bad (a session used to make me sleep – now I wake up at 4am with my heart racing) and if it’s work stress I write it all down which works a treat. Mrs.T doesn’t sleep well and disturbs me then goes back to sleep leaving me staring at the clock…

  13. I can guarantee that if I have a new album on the iPod that I really want to listen to late at night in bed (when it’s nice and quiet) then I will be fast asleep by track 3…..

    Never really had issues sleeping. Get the occasional night when I wake up and doze in and out of sleep but that’s it. My problem is lack of sleep – I’m generally a night owl and don’t go to bed much before midnight but have to be up at 5.30-6am for kids school, work etc. It usually hits me in the middle of the afternoon….

  14. Lucky me, sleep never keeps me awake, hence snooze bound at 10 most nights, even, shockingly, when at Lunar this last w/e……
    I have tried to lie awake fretting, when it would seem the decent thing, but still can’t do it. My idea of early morning waking, as in the depression symptom is/was a lie in compared to you guys, but I awake now most days, just before the alarm, at 6. Easy.
    In fact, all this talk is making me think I’ll toddle off with a good book.9 o’clock! Ridiculous.

  15. I’m another “fall asleep easily but wide awake at 3.30am” type. However, I’ve found a solution which works most of the time – a small under-pillow speaker (mine cost about £12 from Maplins). I plug it into my phone by my bedside, on to which I download podcasts. That means that when I hit 3.30am, I choose a suitable podcast and normally within 10 minutes, I’ve drifted back off to sleep.

    It works best by engaging my brain just enough to still all the other things whizzing around my head, but without anything too jarring to wake me up again. I’ve learnt that music is a no-no (tried listening to @dr-volume ‘s old podcasts but too much good music which kept waking me – ooh, Monochrome Set – ooh, High Llamas etc).

    Boring stuff doesn’t work either as my mind drifts back on to the stuff keeping me awake. Best for me are Radio 4 funny podcasts (the stuff which is actually funny, like the News Quiz, Old Harry’s Game, John Finnemore) or “More or Less” (nerdy stats stuff).

    It’s not foolproof, sometimes I’ll wake a few times, but I’m less likely to lie there worrying that I’m not asleep – just repeat with another podcast.

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