Today’s an opportunity to test whether some sleep is better than no sleep. Always fun to have an experiment running isn’t it. In many respects we’re all constantly running tests on ourselves, on each other. It’s a big part of how we understand the world and the people we spend time with, testing them and ourselves against those internal models. My internal model of myself says that I don’t sleep without drugs, or at least really not well at all. I got by on four or five hours sleep as a teenager, though I don’t think it’s done my memory a lot of good. That, or rote learning which proves to be utterly worthless in real life had little chance of being retained anyway. A bad memory may just be in the family though, so I can look forward to what little I’ve retained up till now just drifting away too. With luck that will include my operating model of myself, in which I have this stubborn belief that I just don’t sleep.
Last night was my first proper without any sleeping tablets. Once more I had that sensation of having missed a window (possibly because I was reading and just wanted to get another chapter in… damn you Max Gladstone), but I semi-persevered, remaining calm, keeping my eyes closed. Until I gave up and rose from unlikely slumber. So I got up, did a bunch of sort of useful things I’d meant to do earlier (compile an ebook of daily stories, sort out poster and flyer designs), was happily joined in the library by Pixie who has plainly been missing her window nest time together and enjoyed some milky tea. At around three-thirty I talked myself into trying to go back to bed rather than stay up all night. I reckon I dozed off after an hour or so into fitful, restive sleep. And then was rudely awoken by a knock on the door – useful, because I’d slept right through my alarm – and lurched into life again.
What I’m looking for from this vexing process of ditching sleeping tablets is feelings. A proper and natural range of emotions. All I’m feeling right now is scratchy eyes and bodily lag; I’m not sure they count as actual feelings. So it is with a vague sense of dread that I unfurl my soul into the first full-length week for an aeon. Hey, that’s a feeling – right?
