A miracle! The three a.m. wake-up call has stopped. The day after finishing my last real task for the Great Desert University, I fell into bed at 8:30 and slept all the way through to 7:00 a.m.: ten and a half glorious hours! Most amazingly, without interruption.
Next night, I slept from 9:30 til around 6:30, nine incredible hours, also without waking up.
Last night I didn’t get to bed until around 11:00 p.m. but slept seven hours, again without the mental alarm going off in the wee hours.
It’s been so long since I’ve slept all the way through the night, I truly can’t remember the last uninterrupted stretch of sleep. Seven hours is a long night’s sleep for me—but it’s normally cobbled together, a few hours before 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and a couple of hours after 4:00 a.m.
Getting quit of GDU is doing it, I suspect. That and feeling fairly confident that I can get by in penury next year. Next year, at least: there’s enough to live on through 2010, and that will provide a full year to figure out what to do next.
SDXB, a man renowned for the soundness of his sleeping habits, remarked yesterday that he woke up at 3:00 a.m. just as though an alarm clock went off, and after that he was up for the duration. As it develops, last week Child Protective Services removed all four of his daughter’s children from her home, lodging one of them with her ex-husband (on condition of 24-hour supervision: the kid is in his home, but the father’s not allowed to be alone with him) and disappearing the other three. No one knows where the other three kids are, whether they are together, whether they’re in foster homes, group homes, or an institution, or what the state intends to do about them.
I observed that this would explain the insomnia. He insisted that worrying wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He says he’s washed his hands of the daughter’s problems, experience having proven there’s not a thing he can do about them.
Uh huh.
Pretty clearly, what wakes you up in the middle of the night is stress. Even if you don’t actually pop into consciousness with your brain spinning on the issue at hand, before long you certainly are turning it obsessively in your mind. I often would wake up unaware of thinking about GDU or money or the ailing dogs any of the other various little headaches that have haunted my dreams over the past few years. At a certain hour, I would just awaken, as though it were dawn and time to get up. Occasionally, though, I actually would wake up in a cold sweat, with the angst du jour right there in the front of my consciousness.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, evidently even when you think you have the stress under control, it doesn’t go away.
I’ve been yawning all morning. Expect to get another solid night’s sleep this evening. It looks like the body is going to try to catch up with all the sleep it’s lost over the past few years.
Oh absolutely!! I hadn’t slept well in over 18 months by the time of the layoff. Sleeping through the night was cause for rejoicing, so rare was it. You don’t intentionally wake up thinking of the thing that’s waking you, it’s very much at a deeper level. It may or may not even be in your dreams.