Sunday 6 February 2011

Giving up control

I probably don't do myself any favours by staying up late, but I suffer with sleepless nights. When I suffer with sleepless nights, I find I do not have the energy to cope with anything. I loose will power (I just don't have the energy to fight my urges) and drive (I haven't the energy to push myself). It is not the same as purposefully depriving myself of sleep..for example, if I were to stay up late to finish a project off and then get up early because I had somewhere to be, or was expecting a guest. In such cases, I don't lack energy, I just feel mildly drained.

There are various reasons that I might have sleepless nights. Sometimes its just a case of not being able to drift off, and I lie awake for hours. The mind only begins to wander, which makes it worse. Recently, the reason has been sheer blind panic. I have begun waking up again every time I just start to drift off. For some reason, the one little part of me that is still vaguely concious registers that it is, I don't know, closing down, and I wake up gasping for breath and braking out in a sweat. It's like subconciously I'm afraid of going to sleep for some reason.

Does that even make sense? The concious part of me drags myself awake again because subconciously I'm afraid of going to sleep?

Anyway, when I do finally go to sleep I'm bombarded with horrific dreams. The other night, I returned to a place I recognised in my dreams (not from real life) only it had been bombed out. Inside were bodies, and they were being tended to by hundreds and hundreds of spiders of every kind. Not eaten or defiled in anyway, but lovingly tended to. Didn't detract from the horror of being surrounded by corpses in a place I obviously had some kind of attachment to, however.

Other dreams follow the same kind of pattern, although the spiders were certainly new. I wonder if it's my recent but sudden occupation with a fear of dying (after a couple of recent deaths in the family) that's done it. I thought I was over it but evidently not. I also wonder if the sleeplessness and crazy dreams are simply explained in terms of my mind not wishing to give up control of my body and become passive and powerless as in death. Perhaps it is control in general that is the issue. I am a controlling person, and when I don't have a percieved level of control I don't fare well. There are a number of things that seem out of my control at the minute, and the sleepless nights and dreams of people dying uncontrollably around me could just be another manifestation of this general feeling of powerlessness.

Either way, I think it would be a good idea to learn to become more open and accepting of the things I have no power over. I hear meditation is good for this, but I can barely manage more than a few minutes. Oddly enough, it is a lack of control over my wandering mind and thoughts that are the issue. I used not to have a problem, but with age comes responsibility and one minute you're drifiting off and the next minute, ooh, I forgot to take tonights chicken out of the freezer to defrost.

Well, whatever the answer is to my little sleep issue, and whether or not I can learn to be a little less controlling, I certainly hope I can rectify the problem soon. My neck is absoloutely killing me, and this only happens after multiple nights of tossing and turning. It would be nice to get a decent nights sleep to iron out all these kinks! Ouch!

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