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I have no trouble sleeping

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, June 8, 2009

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I never have trouble sleeping. I sleep great. It’s one of the things I do best. Sometimes, however, I have trouble going to sleep.

I blame it on my brain, which is every bit as undisciplined as my children were – no amount of water or stories can make it go to sleep if it doesn’t want to, and yelling at it only wakes up everyone else.

I’ve read that when you can’t sleep, you should get up and do something. But when I get up, whether it’s 2 a.m. or 8 a.m., the dogs believe it’s time for me to feed them, and the cats believe it signals the start of a new day of going out and coming in, which they like to do consecutively, rather than concurrently. It’s much easier to stay in the bed.

The biggest danger in lying awake at night is that my brain will get stuck and seize on some commercial jingle, which I will then sing silently, over and over, until I want to scream.

May you never know the hell that is a long night of, “Five-eight-eight, two-three hundred — Empire!”

Delayed brain reactions

Another nasty thing my brain likes to do to me when I’m trying to go to sleep is reminding me suddenly of something I should have done. Sometimes it’s something I should have done that day, like paying a bill or returning a library book. Sometimes they’re things I should have done years ago, like not become a journalist or start smoking. What they all have in common is, it’s too late to do anything about it now, except lay awake and regret not having done them. Thanks, brain.

Sometimes my brain will replay conversations I’ve had, and think up really nifty things I should have said: “I should have told that blonde girl in second grade, ‘Takes one to know one.’ Yeah, that would have fixed her.” Way to go, brain.

The only way to derail these annoying trains of thought is to give my brain something else to do. So for those of you who may suffer from the occasional bout of insomnia, following are some ways of keeping your brain from torturing you:

Remembering

Torture your brain back, by trying to remember things like:

* All seven verses of “Jabberwocky” (here’s a clue: the first and last verses are the same);

* The names of Santa’s reindeer – and no fair substituting Rudolph for one of Clements’ original eight (clue: the original names of two of them were “Dunder” and “Blixem,” the Dutch words for thunder and lightning);

* The names of the Seven Dwarves (clue: there’s no Rudolph here, either);

* The names of at least six of the kids in your first grade class.

Playing games

I’ll share some of mine with you, but ultimately you’ll have to make up your own, because I’ve noticed the things that amuse me often make other people look at me funny:

* Think of as many synonyms as you can for “thesaurus”;

* Recite something you know well backward – you can just say the words in backward order, or be really daring and try saying each word backward. I can sing, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” backward, but no one ever wants me to;

* “A My Name Is Alice” is a trustworthy old standby.

Thinking

Sometimes when my brain’s keeping me awake, I just put it to work. There are all kinds of things to think when you’re doing it for fun, without any performance pressure. Some of the things I’ve thought while trying to fall asleep include:

* How do you go about throwing away a garbage can?

* There are at least a half-dozen auto insurance companies claiming you can save at least $300 by switching to them. If you switched to one and saved $300, and switched again, and again, wouldn’t they start owing you money at some point?

* What is the origin of the words adventitia and adventitious? They’re too similar not to have a common origin. Why does one mean the outer cover of an organ like a blood vessel, and the other mean added or acquired by accident? The first night I thought of this, I thought I’d look it up the next day, but I never thought of it again until I was trying to fall asleep. After a while I had trained myself to always think of it when I went to bed. Now I don’t want to look it up, because if I answer it, what will I think of when I’m trying to fall asleep?

* Sometimes I think of really great ideas for columns.

Sadly, I never remember these after I wake up.

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