On Never Sleeping

I have never slept well. I can remember being about 4 years old, living with my mother in some place that I barely remember, and watching the sun rise thinking "We should sleep. Mommy says our eyes are starting to look funny.". Eventually I would sleep...for about 3 hours and then I was conscious once more. Exhausted for the fifteen minutes it took me to go pee, wash my hands, and then wash my face.

When I try to sleep my thoughts get in the way. I can remember crying to my grandfather, on more than one occasion, that my brain would not let me sleep. I told him that I kept hearing voices and seeing pictures and that I wanted it to stop because I really DID want to sleep. He, not knowing what to make of such a thing, hugged me and sent me back to bed where I would toss and turn and get up and down for hours. It is very hard to sleep when you have so many thoughts and images darting about in your head. Crashing into the walls and on another. And you can't simply NOT think them. It is like your brain is on auto pilot. Fragmented, imageless thoughts or endless repeating video with booming sound (and sometimes no sound at all) go back and forth like some satanic game of ping pong and you cannot for the life of you shut it off. The video is the worst. It flickers. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever had a VHS of a movies that you liked very much? A movie that you watched again and again until you, more or less, knew all of the dialogue verbatim? Remember what that movie looked like AFTER you'd rewound and replayed it a billion times? How the image would shake and flicker and those odd lines would constantly cut through everything? I see THAT when I am trying to sleep. It is maddening. It is painful. It hurts my eyes and there is nothing I can do to stop it short of pressing on my eyes until I see spots and even then there is no guarantee that it will not just seep through the spots and flashes on a dark dark canvass. I often wish that there were a pause button in my mind. I would simply press it before I got into bed and resume play once I'd gotten a respectable amount of Zs.

When I try to sleep my body gets in the way. It wants me to do things. It wants me to walk in little circles, or stretch, or roll on the floor. It wants me to hop hop hop about my room or jump in the bed. It wants me to bury myself under a mountain of heavy blankets until it feels calm enough to be still and let my brain, once it has gone through IT'S routine, go to sleep. I twitch a lot as I lay in bed waiting for unconsciousness to arrive. Mr. Sandman come soon, I think to myself. It is like I have these violent tics when I want to sleep. My arms, legs, and neck are constantly jerking in protest of all the stillness. Get up get up get up, they beg. We are not yet ready to wind down.

Sometimes I will get to the point that it feels like I am about to be asleep and then, suddenly...randomly, I am seized by a hyperactive energy and quite awake once more but still inherently tired. I said sometimes but that is not quite true. It is more like "usually". It takes an eternity to wind back down from such a state.

As a result of these factors I rarely make it to bed anytime prior to 4AM. And then my alarm goes off at 5:45AM signaling that I must get ready for school. "We should sleep. Mommy was right about our eyes. They really are starting look funny."