One thing I don’t talk about often any longer is my sleep issue. In part, it’s because I no longer have one. Well, actually, that’s a large part. It would be boring for me to write a thousand-plus words about how well I sleep every few months. But, a retrospective of how I got here? I’m all over that!
I had undiagnosed hyperthyroidism. In tandem, I never liked to go to bed until midnight or so, even when I was a kid. When I was six or seven, I would be put to bed at whatever time. Maybe eight or so? Way too early. I would stuff a towel or t-shirt in the crack under my door so I could read until midnight or so.
I never liked sleep and used to have night mares all the time. I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism when I was thirteen or so, and had my thyroid destroyed when I was fourteen. That swung me from hyperthyroid to hypothyroid, but it didn’t make me sleep any longer per night. When I was in college, I slept maybe four hours a night. One time, I was so tired, I could not find my portable alarm clock anywhere in my door room. When I opened my mini-fridge to grab a Diet Pepsi, there was the alarm clock. I had no memory of putting it in there.
When I’d go home for vacation, I would sleep for fifteen hours during the first night home. And I’d be sick for the whole time I was home. My body was not happy with me. At all.
when I started Taiji roughly fifteen years ago, it helped me with sleep. I slowly started bulking up the hours. Before that, I tried so many remedies, I’ve lost count. Lavender in the bath (which is how I found out I was allergic to it), St. John’s Wort, Valerian Root (which made me suicidal), warm milk, sleeping pills (I could not wake up, not even after we halved the dosage and halved it again. Asian people, especially Asian women need drastically less of a dosage than white men do), meditation, exercise, a dreamcatcher, and probably other things I’ve forgotten. The only thing that helped was sex, but sleeping with someone hurt, so that was probably a wash.
Taiji was the only thing to help. By a year ago, I had worked myself up to 6 1/2 hours a night. I tried to work on when I got that sleep as well, but that was hard, too. I have always liked sleeping later in the night. I’m able to do so because my work schedule is flexible. At my peak, I would go to bed around six in the morning and get up at noon.
I wanted to get it so I was going to bed around midnight and getting up at six, just because it was more normal. The thing is, though, I liked being awake in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep. It was so dark and quiet and peaceful. It was as if the world was mine alone and no one else’s. I would go out back to smoke and just appreciate the night. It was the best when there were no stars so it was completely dark.
I managed to get my sleep schedule to midnight going to sleep, but then it started creeping back up again. One a.m. Two a.m. Three a.m. Then, nearly a year ago, September 3rd at 3 in the morning, it happened. The whole medical crisis, which led to me staying two weeks in the hospital. I was stuffed to the gills with narcotics, barbiturates, and sedatives. Obviously, they did not leave my body the second I left the hospital. Which meant I was fatigued and drugged up when I got home.
For the first few days, I was asleep a lot. When I was awake, I was exhausted. I was in bed by 10 p.m. and slept until 6 a.m. Eight hours! Unheard of for me. But a natural consequence of me dying twice and all the rest. I would be in bed by 10 p.m. and up at 6 a.m. It was the wildest thing, but it didn’t feel bad, either. In fact, I really appreciated how solid the sleep was. I maybe woke up once to go to the bathroom, but that was rare.
After my parents left, the sleeping pattern stood. Except…it started sliding later and later.
Side note: My brother and I have been exchanging our sleep schedules. He used to get a full eight, but it’s whittled down over the years. Now, he’s on six hours a night whereas I’m up to eight and sat at six-and-a-half for years.
Side note to the side note: There was a time in my twenties when I had four or five nightmares every night. They were graphic and explicit, and deeply upsetting. I actually died once in a dream of mine, which I thought was impossible. I was sleeping (in my dream) on my bed and a large Snuffleupagus who lumbered towards me. My heart started beating loudly as it got closer. As it was getting nearer to me, there was a miasma that overwhelmed me. My heart continued to beat rapidly and then it expired.
I also had a spate of time in which my friends and other loved ones died in my dreams. My brother was killed in a car crash and his pick-up truck was highlighted at the funeral. Kathleen’s husband was murdered in another dream and I found his body outlined in chalk on the ground. That felt like a precog dream, but fortunately never came true. Another friend got squeezed to death by an octopus. And more. It reached the point where my friends joked that you weren’t a friend of mine if you did not die in my dreams.
Other nightmares I had were me being chased, me in disgusting bathrooms with water overflowing from the toilets, me failing tests or forgetting the words to lyrics I needed to sing on stage, and I had repeating nightmares as well. One in particular was me at a shopping mall and a bunch of Kachina Dolls are going down the escalators. There are several of them in a row, and an impending sense of doom fills me. There is nothing scary or awful about it in and of itself, but I remember how much I hated it.
Now, I’m going to bed between 1 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. I’m snoozing beforehand, which means I don’t sleep as long. I’m getting eight-ish hours on average and feeling pretty good. The last few weeks have been odd because I got my third jab (booster) and it was rough. I don’t react well to jabs and this was no exception. In general though, I am pleased with my sleep and hope I can keep it up. It’s such a pleasure being able to get a good night’s sleep; I don’t know how I lived this long without it.