Tag Archives: sleep

March 3, 2025, 4:15 AM

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Currently thinking about Harlan Ellison’s waxing philosophically about being a part of the walking dead.1 Along those lines, I’d love nothing more than to just live a life untroubled by the knowledge of the world around me. I know that for the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history, life has been hard – my comparatively cushy life contains privileges I’m sure to don’t comprehend. Nonetheless, I currently function under the strain of a couple of anxieties that are paradoxically separate yet also somewhat intertwined: anxiety over the current state of affairs here in the United States, and anxiety over the many existential threats looming over the long-term survival of the human species (and if not the species, then absolutely human civilization as we now know it.)

Anyway, the upshot is that waking up in the middle of the night and then having issues getting back to sleep is a real thing. Some nights, such as this evening, reading fiction after waking up in the middle of the night allows my brain to settle down enough for sleep to resume. In fact, I spent most of the past two hours doing just that before my focus drifted from my ebook to jotting down the thoughts now appearing on the screen. Thus far, tonight – maybe I should really say “early morning” – this effort to burn down my mental energy hasn’t worked. 

(Quick aside: it seems amusingly fucked up that reading Deadline, a novel set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, is preferable to letting the anxiety siblings run amok in my head.) 

Anyway, for some time now, I’ve been saying I needed to start forcing myself to write again in some fashion. All things considered, maybe using insomnia time to write, in addition to the reading, may not be the worst impetus to make that start happening.

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1 “You think I enjoy getting up angry every morning, going to bed angry every night? To go through the day with the veins standing out, the bolts unscrewing in my neck? Jesus Christ, I would give anything to be able to be as mellow and cool as most people. I would be one of those slaves, the walking dead, but it would be a relief. Give me six months as a walking dead and I will never say anything angry again.” — Harlan Ellison, Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Sleep, Perchance to Dream

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It’s now 6:15 AM, and this means, for the third day in a row, I’ve been awake for two hours or more. The good news is, according to my sleep app on my watch, that I got 6½ hours of solid sleep last night – which is only 1½ hours less than what I got the previous two nights combined. The solid sleep was also an improvement, given that those same two previous nights included numerous instances of waking up and needing a few minutes to get back to sleep. Alas, these improvements only occurred because I was out by 9:15 and aided by a standard adult dose of generic Benedryl. Tonight, I’ll try to go to bed later, and see if I can get a good night’s sleep without help. If it doesn’t work as hoped, back comes the Benedryl tomorrow night.

Given that this is Sally’s and my vacation week, I was hoping to be able to get much more regular and solid sleep. Alas, the implications of the elections are exactly the kind of thing that my sleep-impaired brain latches onto when I wake up in the middle of the night. Under the best of circumstances, my brain is capable of latching onto the most ridiculous and nonsensical of things that, when returning to bed after needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, can ultimately result in not falling asleep again for anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours. Since the election, waking up for any reason after 3:00 AM and recalling any of the realistic nightmares being enabled by the return of the Der Katzengropenführer just means I’m up for the day.

Something will have to give on that front eventually. I don’t want to become dependent on sleep aids to get a good night’s sleep, and regularly waking up for the day between 3:00-4:00 AM is not feasible. For now, I’m just going to do my best to enjoy and make the best use of my awake time on vacation – there’s still plenty on our to do list we’d like to accomplish before needing to return home – and if the need and opportunity for afternoon naps arises, I’ll absolutely make use of them.