Monday, April 21, 2008

Things to do when you have insomnia

Lie in bed for a couple of hours, hoping you fall back asleep

Take Melatonin, hoping you fall back asleep

See how long you can go without looking at the clock

Listen for the newspaper to be delivered

Pet the cat, hoping you fall back asleep

Read People magazine, hoping you fall back asleep

Envy the cat and the husband who are both breathing deeply and twitching slightly

Eventually give up on the sleep thing and decide to be “productive”

Pay bills

Organize a file

Make a birthday card

Back up your computer

Play Spider Solitaire until you win

Play Freecell until you lose

Poke around on MySpace and realize that the fact that it annoys you greatly that nobody spells correctly anymore suggests that you aren’t the target demo for the social network movement.

Check out your high school alumni website and renew your relief that your 20th reunion is over and done with.

Log into Yahoo Messenger hoping to catch a friend on the east coast or someone else who can’t sleep.

Read the news from places you used to live

Blog

Look up the rules for "lay" versus "lie" yet again

Make plans to crawl back into bed when the sun comes up. Oddly, that often results in a disappointingly short nap.

3 comments:

cogZ said...

Try tricking your brain into thinking it's dreaming by never letting yourself have a logical thought. As soon as something makes sense, free associate into surreal nonsense. It works for me, though I don't have to do it very often. Oh, and I find if I have a little scotch instead of dessert, I sleep like a rock - booze for what ails ya. Or maybe you just don't need sleep?
-Zeke

Toni at Woodhaven said...

Thanks for the tips, Zeke!

Dream tricking is a very intereting tactic. I'm going to try it. Although, my fear is that since I'm not much of a surrealist, it might take me more brain power to be non-sensical. I used to do math in my head (long division was the most successful) to keep my brain busy on something tedious. That had about a 65.742% success rate.

As for alcohol, I've found that it helps me fall asleep but more often than not, I wake up at 3:00am with no hope of falling back to sleep. Of course, I've never tried scotch... Hmmm.

And boy, do I need sleep. Sure enough, the sun came up, I crawled back into bed, and fell asleep for about 2 hours. Zzzzzzz

cogZ said...

65.742%! - LOL!

Yeah, maybe my dream tricking thing works only for dreamer-types (read: space cadets)

-Zeke