There's a reason why sleep feels so good in the morning. There's a reason I like sleeping in, waking up, and staying in bed to get more sleep. It is such a wonderful change from trying to fall sleep and not succeeding. It doesn't happen to me a lot, once a month maybe. But when it does, it really pisses me off. Last night I felt tired, so I thought I'd try to go to bed early. I turned in at around 9pm and I sensed I was a little too alert to sleep. Nevertheless, I was determined to stick with it. After a while I hear noises from the kitchen, people talking and yelling. I knew this is not going to happen. Every time I try to sleep and can't is a defeat, which only adds that much irritation and bad experience to the night.

So I go to bed again at around 2am. By now the house is completely quiet. Just as I feel I'm falling asleep, a goddam fly buzzes right over my head and knocks me out of that feeling of losing consciousness. It is by being awoken from it that I actually know that I was about to fall asleep, cause by then I was already well on my way. And now comes the worst part, the thoughts. There's nothing worse in trying to fall asleep than starting to worry that it's not going to happen. I know this, but somehow the thought comes to me anyway. I try to push it away, but the moment I'm just a little bit conscious of it, I sense that I can't escape it. I try not to think about it, but it's there and while I'm not thinking about it, I'm conscious that it's just it's just one little thought away, so basically it's just as bad as consciously thinking about it.

I've heard people say that if you don't fall asleep within 10 minutes, then you're not tired enough to sleep right now. I cannot think of a time when I would take less than half an hour to fall asleep. So far as far as I'm concerned, that rule is nonsense.

One thing that really gets in the way of sleep is knowing that tomorrow there's something I have to get up for. This kills the prospect of a good night's sleep like nothing else. If it's just an everyday thing, it's not a problem. But if it's something out of the ordinary, a one time event, that is what triggers it. Again, I'm not obsessing about it, but I know that the thought is within reach. And at the first sign of insomnia, it comes knocking. Now there's pressure to fall asleep, cause there's a reason to be up at a certain time in the morning. A couple of times this has happened to me, I couldn't sleep for hours, I gave up and canceled my appointment, and then I could finally sleep.

So I try to distract myself from not sleeping. I watch some tv, a sitcom episode, surf the net for about 20 minutes, something to take my mind off not sleeping despite being increasingly tired. I go back to bed and the bed feels great. I lie on one side, after a while I turn to the other. The longer I'm not sleeping the more uncomfortable the bed feels. Suddenly it's hot, the pillow feels big, so I push it aside, I lie on my stomach, then on my side, on my back, again I can sense this is not going to happen.

I've tried various things to sleep, but I haven't found anything that really works. Taking a shower, going out for a walk, jogging to make myself physically tired, reading, watching tv, a glass of milk, a glass of water, coffee, tea, herbal tea, it's all just a stab in the dark.

Not falling asleep sucks. Eventually there comes a time when fatigue sets in (around 6am I'd say) to the point where falling asleep is very easy. Of course, by that time, any prospect of having a normal day tomorrow is long gone.