Not Sleeping Hell

I'm struggling with the whole sleep thing again. Marion has managed to get herself off the sleeping tablets in the last week. Although this has meant that she's had a week of poor quality sleep, she tells me that one just has to get through it and that now she's sleeping normally. Emboldened by her success, last night I skipped the sleeping pill but took the proferred homeopathic alternative. The result was pretty horrible. 

Initially I couldn't get to sleep at all, I lay in bed tossing and turning, hovering somewhere between sleep and full consciousness. Eventually, at 1.30am, I gave up and took a lighter sleeping tablet that's meant to help one fall asleep. I guess that this did its job because the next thing I knew I was in the middle of a terrifying nightmare. I was descending some stairs when suddenly something I couldn't see grabbed both my wrists. My eyes were closed and I couldn't open them to see what had grabbed me and I was struggling more and more and becoming more and more frightened...  when Marion woke me up. My struggles had woken her up and she realized that something was wrong and so had intervened. I can tell you that I was rather relieved.

I then went back to 'sleep', but continued to dream unabated. Sometime in the early hours I was back in the hospital, in 'our' room on the childrens ward. I decided to go up to intensive care to see how Kay was doing. When I went into her IC room, I found a much younger Kay lying on the floor. She'd obviously fallen out of bed. I started yelling for a nurse and as I looked at Kay her leg suddenly moved. My heart raced. I picked her up and put her on the bed and suddenly she sat up. My heart burst with joy, Kay was back from her coma. She opened her eyes, but was clearly disoriented. I continued yelling for a nurse. Kay then tried to say something to me, but could only mumble. The the nurse came in and I ran out of the room and raced downstairs, burst into the room where Marion was and told her that Kay had woken up from her coma... and then suddenly I woke up and was immediately hit by the realization that it was all a dream and that Kay is gone. Need I say more?

Man, this is extremely tough. Esther told me that the sleeping meds block REM sleep and that it's quite likely that one has to go through a period of effectively catching up on a REM sleep deficiency. But if this is what I'm going to have to go through before I can return to sleeping normally, I have no idea what I'm going to do. I can't face the idea of more nights like last (Friday) night. 

Another consequence of last night is that I've been pretty tired all day. We have been out most of the day doing one thing or another and we got back around 4pm. I put my feet up on the sofa and almost immediately dozed off for an hour or so. A bad move since this almost always makes it more difficult for me to sleep at bedtime. But anyway, we went to bed at the normal time and I decided to bite the bullet and skip the sleeping tablet again - might as well get the bad nights over with as soon as possible. And since it's weekend, if I'm tired tomorrow (Sunday) it doesn't matter so much. But this time I decided to immediately take the lighter "fall asleep" tablet in addition to Marion's homeopathic solution, I had no desire to lie around waiting for sleep to come.

Well, so far this has all been a big failure. It's now 2.15am on Sunday morning and I'm sat downstairs writing this blog entry, absolutely wide awake. I guess that I've been sunk by my afternoon snooze. After taking the aforementioned tablets I lay in bed reading for a bit and then tried to sleep. But I just re-entered the sleeping/not-sleeping zone where my control over my thoughts starts to soften and they go spiralling off towards stress-generating subjects. There's a perversity about this: I need to exercise mental control to relax but as I start to relax so my mental control slips and I start to "unrelax" and so cycle backwards and forwards. But I'm also aware of the whole thing and I start to get frustrated that I can't relax and then the whole show is over - I'm awake, annoyed and far from the level of relaxation that I need to sleep.


The easiest thing would just be to knock back a tablet. But that way lies a kind of addiction. I have to and I want to get off these damned tablets. But equally I've had a sleeping problem for a long time now, for months before Kay died. So maybe it's a bit optimistic to think that I can straighten myself out quite so quickly. But then again, if not now then when should I tackle this problem? I don't really want to try to tackle it during the Christmas holidays. I'd rather like to have a rest during the Christmas period and battling with sleep problems won't help with that goal. Equally I have a lot of work to do the coming weeks and turning up at the office, brain-dead due to a lack of sleep, is not going to help that either.

But then again, again, I hate being dependent on anything, certainly anything artificial and it's going to bug me that I've got a dependency that needs sorting. And Marion's pushed through it, so why can't I? And further, if these tablets build up a REM sleep debt, the longer that I'm on them surely the more mentally painful and difficult it's going to be to unhook myself from the dependency. Also, the sleeping tablets get less effective with time, so then I'm simply building up a REM debt for less gain. Therefore my thinking is that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

So here I am, wide awake in the middle of the night, fearing sleep, dreading failing to sleep, but equally knowing that I'm going to be a zombie tomorrow (today) if I don't sleep. 

I wonder if I can find an ancient copy of the "Val Doonican Show" on iTunes? That would probably be an instant and non-toxic way of falling asleep, though I suppose that there would be a risk of permanent brain damage if I didn't fall asleep within the first few minutes.