Insomnia sucks!

I've lived with insomnia for as far back as I can remember. I'm pretty sure I had it when I was around 16 but I'm not quite sure when it started. Thankfully I only go a few hours without sleep, or a few days at it's worst these days, rather than a few weeks. That's thanks to meditation mostly.

That's meditation with a 'T' not medication with a 'C'.

Not that I've really tried medication much. I kinda try to avoid the stuff as much as possible. You only have one liver and the shit they're prescribing these days often has more to do with what lines people pockets than what might be the best option.

Right now, I've got a little bit of a bought of insomnia going on. Makes it kinda hard to keep a normal sleep pattern.

I stay up too late, waiting to get tired, then try to sleep, and end up just laying there.

But, the meditation does make for some pretty visual.

These days, I practice a simplified form of a meditation technique that I first started using in my teens.

I basically close my eyes, try to regulate my breathing to be as calm as possible, try to relax my body, then stare into the blackness behind my eyes and try to let the visions come to me. When I'm relaxed enough, near sleep, the blackness behind my eyes starts to form shapes and then colours. Pretty soon, I'm seeing full colour scenery and a movie is playing behind my eyes as if I were awake. If I'm really into it, I might start to hear voices from the dream world. Sometimes, those voices come first. It's actually really disturbing to hear thousands of voices all shouting at you from the void. I don't envy people that deal with that in waking.

Although I often wish that I could just fall asleep easily like so many other people do, there are benefits to my techniques that I've learned. I basically start to dream before I'm even asleep. This means that I can start to lucid dream while I'm still mostly awake sometimes.

I'm also a lucid dreamer. That's something that just came naturally from my studies on meditation as a teen, which weren't necessarily related to my insomnia, but are probably the only reason I haven't been driven crazy by it yet.

You know, other people are real assholes when it comes to being an insomniac. They want you to do something for them that requires you to be up at a certain time, so they yell at you because your sleep schedule is all out of whack and you're waking up at 3 pm...or 3 am...or 7pm...or whatever the fuck time your body decides it wants you to be awake. It sucks not really being able to depend on your body letting you keep a normal schedule...and to be honest, I could totally set my alarm and wake up to do whatever the fuck they want me to do...but I don't...because I'm not anyone's fucking slave. If they want my help on some shit, they can fucking pay me, and not treat me like I'm at their beckon call.

My body is weird. Some days it only wants an hour of sleep...others, 12. I never quite know when that's gonna be that it wants either or, but it tends to want less when I can manage to get in a nap during the day because I'm not forced to stay up for some shit. It's weird. I think perhaps my body was kinda made to sleep for small intervals and other people trying to force me to sleep all in one lump once per day seriously fucked that up. If I do manage to get a nap in the instant I'm sleepy, I can fall asleep a lot easier, then I only sleep for maybe an hour, then sleep for maybe 2 or 3 at night. That doesn't really add up to the 8-12 I usually need when I force myself to sleep on a "regular" schedule.

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I'm just not normal and trying to be like everyone else royally fucks me up.

But I still have insomnia a lot, so it's probably a bit more than that. That wouldn't explain the weeks I've gone without sleep before.

Insomnia sucks.

_{Image by Fanette CC0 (source}