INSOMNIAC! Sleepless in Skandia

Insomnia causes all kinds of problems and close calls.

INSOMNIAC! Sleepless in Skandia

 

                Yawn. Rub my dry, gritty eyes and stretch. It’s just another dawn after working the night shift.  Working nights wasn’t the main reason for the problem I suffered, it was the fact that I couldn’t sleep after my shifts, and my insomnia compounded as a week progressed.  Every day nodding off during the drive home to Skandia became a common occurrence until one morning I literally had a rude awakening from a nap taken at a very bad time.

Exhausted on a Friday morning, I drove down US 41 through Beaver Grove. I slowed to fifty miles-per-hour because the Chocolay cop always sat there to catch the morning rush hour speeders heading to Marquette, and even though I drove in the opposite direction away from Marquette, I watched my speed.

                My drowsy focus on the speedometer coincided with a reduced vigilance on the road often resulting in a head-bobbing nod off or a downright short nap. On the curve before Green Garden Hill, I snapped awake to the sound of gravel ricocheting under the floorboards and weeds and saplings slapping the bumper and fenders. WHOA!  With sudden wide-awake awareness, I found that I headed toward the ditch.

                Along with panicked braking, I swerved and slid to dusty halt. I gazed around to see who had witnessed my detour off the road. A couple in a car craned their necks to eye my ditch-diving maneuver, but no one going by worried enough to stop. A bit shaky and wide awake with the adrenaline rush, I drove home but sleep came even harder than usual that day. That was the first roadside close call…

 

Mornings after work meant squinting against the morning’s sunlight beaming through the windows as I rub my eyes experiencing the oh-so-familiar dry scratchy tenderness.  With droopy eyelids that barely open, the rubbing feels like sand grinding between my eyes and lids. Without looking in the mirror, I know what my tired eyes look like which is the same as yesterday and the day before�" red bloodshot with drooping sags underneath.  It will be another toss and turn day with sleep ultimately falling upon my troubled sleep-deprived consciousness for a couple scant hours that is never enough.  

                You know what I purport without spelling it out, but here it is nonetheless: insomniac /in somnee ak/ n a person with an inability to fall asleep or to remain asleep long enough to feel rested, especially as a problem continuing over time. [Early 17C. < Latin insomnis “sleepless”< somnus” sleep.”] Self-consciously, I want to know why someone who simply, innocently cannot sleep is subsequently labeled with an ac. Is it because we drive ourselves and others crazy, comparable to the other acs such as megalomaniac, general-purpose maniac, or in my opinion the not so bad nymphomaniac?

                I figure that everyone for various reasons has not sleep for a night or two or more, but do you realize how it feels after several days without any decent sleep? It is not much fun to simply exist during a day. If you don’t know what that is like, then I’m insanely jealous for a good night’s sleep is number one of my three most desired activities in life. Life is simply miserable without sleep like the television commercial for the sleep aid Ambien, which states: “You feel disconnected, out of step with the world around you.” Yes, I live that feeling.

                Casual acquaintances ask why I look so exhausted, commenting, “you look awful.” What am I supposed to say, “why, thank you?” When I explain my struggle with insomnia continuing over a period of weeks, they are clever enough to give me unassuming, unfeeling advice like, “hey, you’re a writer, you must have loads of extra time to write!” 

                Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. This comment is usually from the same person who assumes migraines are an essential part of a writer’s psychosis which applies to me except I have a hard time calling myself a “writer” or an “author” even though I have published works out there.  I’ve tried writing on the long sleepless nights, but the struggle for a couple coherent lines always seems to turn to crap. My gravel -filled red eyes burn in the laptop’s liquid crystal glow that gives the nighttime room a nice blue-gray hue, but my mind flickers with a hue of emptiness.   I end up writing stream-of-consciousness nonsense with two or three rhyming lines about warm fuzzy stuff and leafy green foliage. I hate poetry, but I tend to spew it out haphazardly at night.  I don’t know why my sleep-deprived brain goes there, but that’s what usually happens�"I sit there and stare, at a opus in progress, to ponder the wonder, of sleep with sheep, jumping over a fence, without offense. You get the idea.

                Someone suggested that I must enjoy working the night shift. No, that isn’t true either because I hate it, always did. In my Air Force Weather Forecasting job I had to work night shifts in a rotating schedule.  The schedule generally followed a pattern of three nights on, two off, in three consecutive cycles, and then I went back to working days or swing shifts. I could tough out three night shifts pretty well. On nights, I would sleep perhaps an hour or two in the morning and an hour or so before going to work at night to survive until a blissful night off comes at the end of the night shift cycle. Not that I’d sleep all that well even then.  I was young and resilient though constantly lived with crimson, bloody red, droopy sand-filled eyes.  

                From where does insomnia originate in a person? Why do we suffer from it? I can’t say I’ve done any research on the cause of insomnia I just search and find loads and loads of information on how to try and cure�"hopefully solve my and others’ infliction.  Can anyone out there relate? I try to stick to a tight schedule, neither too early nor late, lie in bed with head facing north, dropped caffeine, do nothing exciting and perform mind numbing, calming exercises.

Usually lying down to sleep, our dog on the floor issues a vocal sigh and within thirty seconds she is breathing deep, a journey far into doggie-la-la land. Maybe a minute later my wife follows suit breathing deep and is off to her own personal dream world. There I lie wondering if I’ll ever sleep. I’m jealous. Even on off days, sleep doesn’t come for hours this time of the year�"springtime. After an hour or so of brain numbing/calming, brain-dead nothingness, I am still lying there ruminating on all sorts of things.

                What I did today. What I should have done today. Thinking back, much further back I remember what I did last year, ten years ago. Then I recall my first car, my first girlfriend, first kiss, first sex, and so on and on. My eyes dark accustomed seem stuck wide open and I scan the room as through ground-glass lenses. The room’s features take on ill-defined shapes in the dim quarter light like grainy sand sculptures. The dresser, door, wall coverings all have a dark fuzzy appearance like poor television reception with massive static interference. The smoke detector indicator light above the door that I remember installing as per stated instructions line by line seems to burn through my retinas boring right into my brain. That beady light is so bright and piercing it hurts, and as I ruminate, I return to my earliest recollections of insomnia, or so I fathom.

                I recall lying awake as a child, alone in my bedroom with a nightlight casting shadows across the floor and up the wall. Hours of sleep deprivation, I recall a sort of haunting paranoia I assumed as normal for a juvenile bet wetter. Looking around my room in anxious red gravelly eyes, shadows shifted shapes and seemed to drift from position. My favorite pictures pinned to the walls bent and sagged, forming flexible parallelograms with ill-defined rounded corners. I wanted to close my eyes to sleep but was frightened of what might happen next. Thinking back, I haven’t a reason for those hallucinations that seemed almost drug induced. No one volunteered information on something never brought up. So, maybe that’s the reason for insomnia in my case anyway, a child’s paranoia becoming adult insomnia with connections made somewhere in the deep, dark subconscious.

More recently in the civilian workforce, I was promoted from part-time to full-time which had great benefits and potential, but had the drawback that I had to start on night shifts. This meant five nights straight each and every week, months forever so I assumed. I pressed on and gave it my all, and it actually didn’t work out so bad through the late autumn and winter with me generally getting four or five hours of sleep during the daytime at least by the fourth or fifth night. I lived with the bare minimum of sleep.

                Then spring arrived and going to bed in the bright sunshiny morning I suffered with birds that sang too damn loud, kids that played all day long, the brats, and the days, well the days were getting longer by five to six minutes a day. My sleep deprivation is particularly worse during the spring and autumn when the length of day changes the greatest. Don’t ask me why, it just does.

                Three weeks after taking the full time night shifts, I didn’t get as far as Beaver Grove on my drowsy drive home. I remember it was another Friday morning, my last shift of the week and the rising bright springtime sun felt especially brutal on my grainy red eyes. It was warm enough to have the window down and the cool air off of Lake Superior seemed to help me stay awake. Traveling out of Marquette on US 41, I drove up and over Shiras Hill and past the prison gift shop, though I can’t remember if I was conscious enough to acknowledge those landmarks. 

                Suddenly, my truck bounced hard and the squall of tires not mine snapped me awake. My chin against my chest, I jerked my head up to see the solid rock cut coming at me head on�"fast. I slammed on the brakes cranked the wheel. I slid about on the grass beside the highway and swerved back on the highway only to get horn blasted by a considerate delivery truck driver. I don’t know if a collision was close, but my heart pounded nearly out of my chest as I cautiously continued on. The next day I saw that I had left a set of dandy J-ruts in the grass. That did it; I decided I couldn’t carry on working night shifts. I turned in my notice the following Monday, the same day an afternoon working woman turned in her notice, so I withdrew my notice on learning the  vacant afternoon shift was mine for the taking.

                So in the meantime, I lay awake and contemplate this non-fiction body of fact. Another nearly sleepless night is drawing to a close as the glow of morning twilight begins, I feel myself drifting off for an hour or so, dreaming of a blissful eight hours of deep sleep, but for now, I’ll be sleepless in Skandia.

At least I didn’t write this piece during the dead of night in lame rhyming poetry.