Sleep, Or Lack Thereof

So I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

I know, I know; as far as insightful opening lines go, this one ranks pretty low, but it does have the benefit of being true.

Night after night after night (That’s right, three nights) I’ve laid in bed, sleepless. I try to fall asleep, but the act of trying just makes things harder.

One reason why is my breathing, something that seems to be hard to do recently. Here lies the initial spark of insomnia. I can’t breath so therefore I can’t sleep. One follows the other, like day follows ‘ice cream sun’ (If you spelt it wrong). You ever tried sleeping whilst holding your breath? Really, really hard.

But breathing is hard to fix. He set yourself a rhythm, breathing out more than you breathe in, then you think of anything that isn’t oxygen related. Years of having asthma has taught me that it is often not the fact you can’t breathe that is the problem, but the fact that you know that you can’t breathe.

So anyway, there I am, breathing rhythmically and thinking of anything I want. I count sheep for a while, but stop when I realize that my mind can do anything with these sheep, and making them jump a fence is really boring. I start to ask myself questions. Really mundane things; I don’t want to keep myself up with complicated philosophical questions.

What is two plus two? Four!

Who is a nicer person: Hitler or Alison Janney? Certainly not Hitler!

Which is better: water or squash? Brita filtered? MISTAKE!

Suddenly I’ve answered a question with a question and started a reaction that will last almost all night. It’s not even like it was important.

Of course the water is Brita filtered. With this question you’d always take the best water and the best squash. But that answer doesn’t change my previous one; I prefer squash no matter how filtered the water is. So I’ve started this chain of questions for no godly reason.

Because now I’m wondering whether you could filter fizzy water. Would you lose the fizz? How about squash, could you filter that? Would you just get water out the other end? And then, would there be orange gunk in the top bit? And coke? What happens if you filter that.

Of course, without access to a Brita filter and the drinks or, at the very least, the internet I couldn’t find out the answers. So all I’d have was a bunch of pointless, unanswered questions floating around in my head. And this, in turn, leads to no sleep.
You’d think that after one night of this, I’d be tired enough to fall straight asleep the next night. And you’d think right. But I only seem to be sleeping for a couple of hours before waking and repeating the same process again and again.

So here I lie, typing this, tired to the bone. There is no reason for me to be mentioning this apart from one thing: If anyone has a Brita filter and ready access to coke, could you do me a favour?

:P

http://kokosowa.deviantart.com/art/insomnia-and-the-city-91479694