Sleep

There has only been one occasion in my life when I have truly been afraid to sleep.

I have a difficult sleep clock. I think it runs on a twenty eight hour cycle. If I’m left to my own devices, I quickly slip into a routine of going to bed later and later and waking up later and later too. I tend to push myself too far: I work and work in the evenings and don’t know when to stop. I look at the clock at one in the morning and I know I can get another hour or so in before I go to bed. Then the next night it’s half past one, then two, then three, and before I know it I’m not waking up until one o clock in the afternoon and I can’t sleep at all at night because by the time I’m tired, the birds are singing and the sky is blue.

I suffer from insomnia. I was suffering badly from insomnia last summer. Unusual, as I tend to suffer more in the winter when the nights are long and the daylight hours are short. Sunlight tends to force me to wake up earlier, acts as a corrective to my Martian rhythms.

Insomnia. My sister had some sleeping pills. As children we both had M.E. Part of our bullshit “treatment” for M.E. was prescribed sleeping pills – the theory going around at the time was that M.E. sufferers were getting “the wrong kind of sleep,” shallow dream sleep instead of deep body-repairing sleep.

I’d never really bothered to take the sleeping pills during the “treatment,” they didn’t do anything for me except make me feel even more exhausted, and besides, by that time I had learnt to see through doctors who were making things up as they went along.

But I started taking the sleeping pills because I was sick of the insomnia, frustrated that I was missing half of the summer because I couldn’t make myself wake up early enough to see it.

I quickly became locked into a different cycle: sleeping early and waking late, exhausted and dull of brain. I must have been getting a good twelve hours sleep every night. The pills were tiny, but I am a small person, and I was overdosing without even realising it. When I didn’t take the pills I wouldn’t sleep until late because I had risen late because I had taken the pills.

A month, maybe, of this, of my mind cushioned in a haze of medication, too dull to realise what was happening, too stupid to pick up on all the subtleties of human behaviour around me that I use as a protective shield. I got hurt, sucked in, made a fool of more than once in that month, and I was in too much of a haze to see what was going on around me.

I was working at a pub at the time. People buy you drinks at pubs. One Friday night I had a single vodka and orange before I came home. I forgot, took my pill in the vain hope that I would get to sleep early, manage to wake before midday.

As I lay in bed my heart began to race. I think it must be like that when you take speed, or sniff poppers. I could feel it pounding against the wall of my ribcage. I tried to muffle it with a pillow clenched to my chest. Still it pounded. Louder, louder. I couldn’t sleep for the pounding. I couldn’t get up either.

That was the most frightening part of it. I lay in bed and my limbs were so heavy I felt as if I’d turned to soft stone. I thought someone was sitting on me; an incubus smothering my chest under his weight.

I began to drift towards sleep. Every time I got close to sleep I ceased to breathe. Terrified, I struggled to remain awake, my heart thudding erratically, jerking, a pulse throbbing inside my brain. I thought I was going to swallow my own tongue. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call out, I could barely summon the energy to think.

I kept telling myself, just don’t sleep. Don’t fall asleep because you won’t wake up.

I don’t remember what happened. I think I must have slept eventually. Just that I’m still here. In that drugged state, I really thought I was going to die.

I didn’t ever take any more sleeping pills after that. And I never will again.