I never quite understood Owl City’s line, “[…] I’m far too tired to fall asleep?” that he sung in Fireflies until recently.
I’ve not been sleeping well. I can’t fall asleep at all, actually. Well, I do drift into unconsciousness, but I never achieve rest, even though I’m going into REM.
Last night was one of the worst examples of this. I basically spent all night awake. I fell asleep, but I didn’t sleep at all. I thought it wouldn’t yield any results until I searched it up; apparently there’s something called “paradoxical insomnia.” That’s not it, but I thought it was interesting topic to learn more about. (You know how much I love learning.)
It’s gotten to the point where sleeping is becoming even more of a chore than before. I thought it was getting better, but it rebounded even harder than it did before last night. Even though my sleep schedule has always been all types of crazy forever, I’ve never suffered from insomnia before. I’ve always been able to adequately rest; it’s getting my mind tired enough that’s hard. My brain can stay on far longer than my body, so I need to exhaust that before I can finally go to bed.
Now, though, I get tired, but sleep isn’t coming easy. My eyelids are never heavy. When I close them, it feels more like blinking; usually sleep is accompanied by a certain heaviness on your eyes, but I haven’t felt that in a long time. For weeks now, it feels like I’m feigning sleep until it comes to me for real. Once it arrives, even that is never deep or heavy enough to feel restorative; when I do dream, it’s barely outside my reach. It feels like it’s hardly hanging on.
It makes me sick to my stomach. This isn’t an exaggeration. I’ve been stumbling through my days plagued with constant nausea. It gets worse at night, where I start gagging in order to get away from it. Part of me feels like I should just commit to vomiting in order to make it go away. It’s all I can think about, every day.
I’m not confident I’ll be sleeping easier tonight, either, but I’m hopeful for it, and I’d like to think I will. If it’s gone away once, then what’s stopping it from ending again? I think it’ll happen soon. It has to.
