O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

– Shakespeare – 2 Henry IV (3.1.7-10)

Insomnia is my companion. It follows me every day of my life, through good times and bad, through sickness and health. No matter what happens, I can always depend on it to be there.

It seems my day is based on a 28-hour cycle. Either I’m awake 14 hours, 28 hours, or 56. No in-between most days. The 14-hour days are when I’m depressed and can’t wait for sleep to relieve me of waking. The 28-hour day is my “normal” insomniac sleep-wake cycle. And the 56 hours is when I’m really manic and can’t sleep until I virtually drop from exhaustion.

What this does to my circadian rhythms is to put me into permanent jet lag, also known as desynchronosis, dysrhythmia, or dyschrony. I seldom feel really rested or fully awake. There’s always a little drag there somewhere.

As for when I’m awake, it depends on the cycle. Much of the time I’m awake during the night (it’s 2:40 am now), but sometimes the cycle wheels around and I am awake in the early morning. Of course, no one’s awake in my household during the night, so it’s just me and Rupert the cat, who always comes running when I’m in the kitchen, day or night.

A quick look with Google tells me that I have (tah-dah) Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder, of the Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Syndrome variety, “which causes… sleep to occur later and later each day, with the period of peak alertness also continuously moving around the clock from day to day.”

I’m sure that this whacked out sleep schedule plays havoc with my circadian rhythms. I’m not nocturnal, nor diurnal, but “omniurnal,” awake at any time my sleep period tells me to be. I sleep when I can’t stay awake any more, and I wake when I can’t sleep any more.

So the concept of my “day” is something akin to my notions of “reality” or “normality.” It’s a free-floating thing, liable to change at any moment. When I am awake, it’s “day,” and when I’m asleep it’s “night.” I no longer call my medication “morning” and “evening,” but “waking” and “bedtime.”

“Yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” are relative, too. How can I say “yesterday” when I woke up yesterday and and am still awake today? Is midnight the demarcation line, or is it just a fiction of the clock? And today was yesterday’s “tomorrow.”

Dated journal entries are a mess. What is the date if I’ve been up both the 3rd and the 4th? Even this blog entry should be dated the 3rd, though it will go in as the 4th.

Some people decry those who are slaves to the clock. Fortunately, in my “retirement” I seldom have to be anywhere at any specific time, so hours may pass by before I look up at the clock, surprised. I count my hours more by the movement of the sun — of course, when it’s daylight. I’ve gotten pretty good at that.

But at night, there’s no accounting for time by the sun, and the moon is unreliable as a timepiece. If I don’t look at the clock, I can’t tell what time it is. It’s all the same.

I think that’s one of the things I miss most about this insomniac sleep schedule: the sun and being able to count the hours by it. It seems odd to me now that there was a time when that was not so. I got up by the clock and went to bed by the clock. Like so many things in my life, that was B.C. — before catastrophe. But that’s another story for another day.

I used to get upset about my insomnia, but I’ve come to accept it as just another part of living that I have to get on with, like diabetes or bipolar disorder. Make what you can of it and forget about when life was different.

Filed In Category: Musings

Tagged as: Insomnia, Time