Yesterday, I wrote about sleep and how mine has been getting more erratic in the past few months. I was not sure why because it’s been pretty consistent since I left the hospital. A tight eight hours, waking up once to pee. Yes, I had been pushing the time back later and later, but I was still getting my eight hours. In the last month or two, however, it’s been reverting to how it was before. Waking up and not being able to fall back asleep. Six-and-a-hlaf hours total instead of eight. I have no idea why because it’s not as if my life is very different.
Then, I realized why it might be. I have started to do more Bagua than I have before. It’s still an internal martial art, yes, but it’s way more energetic than Taiji is. It gets my blood going, and it makes me so hyped. My Taiji teacher told me to do it in the morning when I first wake up because it really pumped up the blood. I try to do it early in my Taiji routine, but it still seems to keep me agitated hours later.
I can’t say it’s a direct correlation, obviously, but it seemed to have started at the same time as when I got serious about Bagua. When it was just walking the circle, it didn’t get my blood up as much. In general, the walking the circle did not get to me like that. It’s the teacup move that does it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s moving your hands in a certain pattern while holding your hands flat as if a teacup full of tea is on each one. The drill is for each hand forward, individually, then bothtogether. After, it’s each hand backwards, individually, then both. This is what gets me going, and I’m pumped.
If this is the reason that I’m having more trouble with my sleep, then so be it. It makes me feel better in general, and that’s what is important. I am still getting eight-ish hours on a regular basis. I’m just waking twice and not falling back to sleep as easily.
I’m ok with it, though, because I’m still getting enough sleep. It’s weird, though ,that some days I’m raring ot go and other days I just want to constantly nap. I’ll wake up, struggle to do something for five minutes, then fall back asleep. Other days, I just sail through everything I need to do without a second thought.
I know that’s just normal, but I had been used to sleeping eight hours every night, no problem. Which just goes to show that you can get used to anything. I spent all my life struggling with sleep and barely eking out six-and-a-half hours. I convinced myself that was enough, even though it clearly wasn’t. I was tired all the time, which was one reason that I didn’t really think it was that big a deal when I was exhausted a few days before my collapse. That’s just the way I lived my life back then.
Now, however, I’m mostly OK. Not well-rested, but not exhausted, either. So these days of being very tired are strange. It harkens back to the early days, which I don’t like. Plus, it makes me wary that I’m going to have another medical crisis.
I’ve been taking it for granted that I’ll sleep decently. In general, I do. But then for three or four nights in a row, my sleep is fucked up. Then, the next night, I’ll crash for nine or ten hours–which normally, I would only do when I was sick.
It’s funny how easy it is to take sleep for granted–until I could not do it any longer. I wonder if I went back to going to bed at ten at nigt, I would sleep better. I don’t think so, but I’m not a doctor. I do not know circadian rhythms and how they work.
Ideally, I would like to sleep eight hours a nigth, only waking up once. I don’t want to go back to the old days of patchwork sleep. When I was in my twenties, I used to have nightmares almost every night. Sometimes, it was several nightmares a night. Most of them were in the ‘I can’t remember my lines in a play’ kind of nightmares, but once in a while, it was truly horrific.
There was a period of my twenties in which all my friends died in my dreams. There was a joke that you weren’t really a friend of mine if you didn’t die in my dream. It was funny because it was true. My brother died in a car accident (he drove a pick-up truck at the time) and his pick-up truck had a funeral in a church. He had a car accident a week later and called me, clearly shaken. He told me that I had been right, and when I asked right about what, he said about him being in a car accident. I reminded him that he died in my dream, and, thankfully, I was not right about that.
I don’t have precog dreams. There was one I thought felt like one, but it thankfully did not turn out to be true. Yes, in it another person I cared about died, though not personally a friend. In fact, he was brutally murdered. In another dream, a friend was in a tree with a giant octopus and then there was an octopus-related death. Crushing, I believe.
The wildest dream I had, though, was one in which I was sleeping in bed. Yes, I was dreaming about sleeping. That was not the wild part. As I was sleeping, there was a large, shadowy figure slowly moving up to me. From the foot of the bed to the head of the bed. It was like a Snuffleupagus, but more menacing. He moved as if he was in molasses, and there was some weird kind of music being played in the background. From an outside viewpoint, there was nothing horrible about it. But in the dream, it was terrifying. When it stopped at the head of my bed, I stopped breathing. Yes, I died in my dream. Which I had heard was impossible. But I did it, anyway. Because I’m all about the dying.
Now, I rarely remember my dreams. when I do, it’s the ‘I forgot I had the test’ kind of dream. I can deal with those, even though I don’t like them. They are just mundanely annoying rather than terrifying. It’s a definite step up.