I’m still at the Winedale country place and I may not go back to Houston until I receive a summons I’m afraid to ignore. Like maybe a dental appointment next week.
We’re getting some slow, on-again-off-again rain that makes sleeping here a pure-d luxury. Windows and doors wide open. A sweet humid breeze easing across the room. Just the right amount of covers on the bed. And the raindrops making their soft spatters on the tin roof.
I’m feeling guilty because I just had a letter from a friend who’s suffering through a siege of insomnia. I’ve been there, and thankful to be back. Not being able to sleep is torture. When I was having my case of insomnia I had a list of about a dozen ways to bring on sleep, all the way from drinking a warm glass of milk to taking violent exercise. None of them worked very well. Warm milk always nauseated me, and violent exercise just made me an exhausted insomniac.
Did you ever try the keep-the-eyes-open trick? Stare into the darkness, eyes wide open. Don’t let them close. If they want to close, fight to keep them open. Theory is that eventually they’ll close and you can’t reopen them and you’ll be asleep.
Another one I tried is the blocked-brain stunt. This one seldom worked for me but I liked the idea of it. Imagine that all your thoughts come from outside and enter your brain through your eyes. Now imagine that your eyes are masked by two black discs, and no thought can penetrate them. So you lie there and watch all these thoughts streaming in like machine gun bullets but they glance off the discs so no thought can get in your brain to keep you awake and you’ll sleep. This stunt works for some people. I had one person tell me the noise of the thoughts hitting the discs kept him awake but I doubt he was really trying.
The ancient ritual of counting sheep jumping over a fence may still be worth a try. This never worked for me. I always had one or two black sheep who refused to go over the fence. They’d balk, and all the other sheep would pile up behind them and mess up the rhythm of the count.
No go-to-sleep system works for me like rain on the roof.