Insomnia Is A Funny Thing

I've decided to quit worrying about it. It's not like I have to get up at a certain time... most mornings. When I do, I've figured out how my latest alarm clock actually works, except for the bit about having a second alarm at a different time so it's not always set for 7:30 even after I think I've changed one or both of the alarm times, but it's mostly good enough. Coffee mostly works, despite what various doctors have recommended. So what if I can go right back to sleep after having my morning cup unless I get up and move around doing something? If I'd had to be up, I'd be active and awake, problem solved.

So if we knock of the it's-bad-for-you hypothesis, insomnia might actually have some uses.

I've been looking back at what actually keeps me alert after I've gone to bed exhausted from my day and thinking I was ready to fall asleep in the middle of my book or during a TV show, both of which I'm actually interested in. (Hey, the boring ones don't count.)

There was a time it was worry keeping me awake. Something bad had happened or was likely to happen and I needed to figure out how to deal with it so it could be fixed as soon as it possibly could. It may have been something with a kid, or the car, or some necessity there wasn't funding for. It's not that late night worrying often helped with whatever-it-was. It's just that the brain just wouldn't let go.

Life is much simpler now. Life's really major problems I can't fix anyway. The usual other issues mostly take care of themselves without me. If the car breaks down, it's not going to cost me a day or three of unpaid work time. If a blizzard is rolling in and I still have to get out and drive in it... oh wait, that's why I moved down here. Pain mostly isn't an issue any more. My kids have been adults for so long now that I'm a great grandmother. If they haven't got it figured out yet for themselves, they can lose their own sleep over whatever it is.

Still, there are many nights when the moment the head hits the pillow, the wheels start churning. Mostly, I've decided it's creativity. That usually translates into something from lapidary club. My brain learns, or learns about, something new and different. It might be from a workshop showing a new technique, or seeing an item for sale in the shop. I'll start trying to figure how to accomplish something either like somebody else did that I never saw before, or it might be working on a variation of a method I just learned in a workshop.

I think I know what I want a finished product to look like, and I can come up with five different bad ways to go about it. It might be a way to work wire into a specific form, and I can spend a couple hours figuring out why step A can't come before step B, or why step C can't be done at all. It might be a new technique where I plan which color wire combinations work with which other colors and a particular stone and/or how a bead works into the design. And just which bead?

On a completely different track, it might be a blog posting that starts working its way through my brain and unless I'm completely confident I can/will remember each word in the morning, it just has to be tackled NOW. Or it can simply be a way to turn the brain off of whichever spiral path it was on for the last hour and a half before I gave up and had to do something different. Sometimes a few pages of reading will do the same thing. Or maybe chapters. Or TV shows. It all depends.

Eventually the brain of this former morning person gives up and I can walk back down the hall with the full expectation that two seconds after the head hits the pillow I'll be unconscious.

Then it's time to start the wild ride through my dreams. Now there's a fun time! That's where we really ride the improbability train!