It must be ...

You can feel it slipping out from underneath you, your sleeping patterns.  Tired, but can't sleep.

It is 11.30 pm and you can't sleep and so you read until you can.  Which in your case is when you put the book down at 1.48 am.

This nocturnal sort of behaviour means it must be getting close to the winter solstice ... oh, look, there it is, four days away.

On the minus side, this whole deal is disruptive.  You can feel it rising up as anxiety in your body, gripping around your heart.  On the plus side, you work from home (this whole deal is one of the reasons why you do) so it's not too disruptive.  On the plus side, you are getting to read a whole lot :)

4.56 am

... and just going to bed. Hmmm. Last night, after my art therapy session, I had this massive, massive headache. Never again will I doubt that suppressed anger causes headaches. This was old, old anger, and it threatened to pop the top of my head. Maggie did some reiki on me, which was strange in itself. She said she could feel sort of tiny little electric shocks on her fingers. Weirdness.

By the time I got home after art therapy, I was feeling so bad, with such an awful headache, that it got me moaning. And yet at the same time I was starving. Which is a strange combination. But it's been a strange week.

I dialled home delivery, ate it, and went to bed at 7.30. Slept until 12.30 when pop goes the eyelids and I get my very own night watch for the next four hours. It's amazing how quickly four hours can go in the dead of night when you're feeling like you're the only person in the world. It felt like it dragged and yet at the same time I managed to fill it in pretty easily, polishing off a bit giant wad of the latest Wally Lamb book I'm reading. But oh, there's nothing lonely like 4 am.

Getting to see it twice in one week is not really my idea of good sleep hygiene. I feel like a skanky sleep ho, right about now.

Fell asleep around 4.30. Slept till 9.30 this morning. Felt like shite all day. Looked forward all day to getting home and getting to sleep at a reasonable sort of hour.

And yet here we are.

I began my week with a Eurovision Song Contest get-together which had me going to bed at 3 am. All of this has been combined with me fighting off (successfully so far) the onset of some sort of cold, or flu, or ear infection return, or something. I don't know what the hell is going on in my body this week. It's all discombobulated.

And yet, in the midst of all of that, art therapy breakthroughs for me. A sense that old habits are being dislodged. This new birth in the midst of all this feeling unwell and gargantuan headaches and upsettedness and crying jags.

It's enough to make a girl want to take the day off work tomorrow. Luckily for me, my work is flexible on its starting times. Which basically means for me that even though I have had this crazy non-sleeping night, I will still be able to rejig things so that I can fit in a five hour shift by the time I wake up at lunchtime. And hey, my job might be boring but it is perfect for circadian morons like me :)

Here's to better sleeping habits for the rest of the week

Two Tone & Watch - Sleep in the Pre-Industrial Age

Saw this at Debra Lynn Dadd's Rooted in Nature blog (Kelvin Cunnington would never let her call it that in Australia) about sleeping patterns before clocks and lighting and all such modern contrivances. Sleep is a fascinating subject to me, even more so in a more 'natural' way. Me, I wouldn't have a chance in hell of sleeping in this fashion. But I would love the opportunity. Perhaps I shall do as my friend Jane did, and go and live in a cave for eight months :)

Whereas today we expect that we should sleep the night through--and call it insomnia and take a drug if we don't--in times past, the acknowledged natural sleep pattern was quite different. For most of human history, sleep was broken into two segments, with one or more hours of quiet wakefulness in between.

The initial period of slumber was called "first sleep" or "first nap" or "dead sleep." The later interval of sleep was called "second sleep" or "morning sleep". The time of wakefulness was called "watch." Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same amount of time, but there was no set timetable. Each person slept and waked according to their own rhythm. References to these periods of sleep and wakefulness are so common in pre-industrial writings that it appears to have been common knowledge. Wild animals also sleep in segmented intervals.

A sleep study done in the 1990s by the Institute of Mental Health confirmed this to be our natural pattern. Left to their own tendencies, without clocks or artificial light, the participants gradually eased back into the natural sleep pattern of two periods of sleep with a period of wakefulness in between. In an attempt to recreate conditions of "prehistoric sleep," subject were without artificial light for up to fourteen hours a night. Subjects tended to first lay awake in bed for two hours, sleep for four hours, spend two or three hours in quiet rest and reflection, and fall back to sleep for four hours before awakening and rising the next morning.

When electric lights were invented, people had more hours of activity available to them, and their time awareness shifted. Imagine for a moment if your activity was determined by the natural light of the sun. During the summer, there would be longer hours of active time available, and in the winter, fewer hours. Long dark nights would encourage more sleep, a kind of hibernation. Yet today, we just turn on the lights and ignore seasonal changes of natural light.

Pic: Willy Whopper
Sculpture: Mimmo Paladino