Dreamtime

Dreamtime - Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20

Ah! Sleep! The word itself is short enough, but these five letters that fit into one hand hold a lot of power. Sleep or no sleep, how much sleep, what quality of sleep? So many possible outcomes over which I have no control.

I have had difficulties with sleep my whole life. The consequences of insomnia are extensive. I am not functional without sleep. When I don’t sleep, I can’t focus, I can’t think straight, read, attend to anything. I have no patience. I can’t make myself do anything. Insomnia forces me to stop everything.

I become very anxious when I can’t do anything. I feel powerless. Where do I feel powerless in my body? In my belly. I feel tension there, just thinking about it.

.

The world-wide web informs me that insomnia is common in people who have had seizure disorders. This makes sense to me, since seizures do result in trauma to the brain. But can they still be robbing me of sleep fifty years after having ended? I have devised many strategies in my life to work around the physical impact of epilepsy: a scattered mind, an inability to remember anything in any particular order, an impulsive streak that opens the door to many adventures (to put it mildly). Despite these challenges, I have made my way in the world with some measure of success.

Certainly, there must be a way to deal with this. After all, I am nothing if not creative.

Light-headed and bleary-eyed from yet another night of tossing and turning, I decide, even in my weakened state, to face the issue head-on.

Over the years, I have tried many products and potions, adopted rituals and rules, but none of these approaches have yielded reliable results. It is time, as my first meditation teacher used to say, to ship this issue “upstairs”.

I sit on a stool in my studio, a place where I feel completely safe. I place another stool directly across from me. I close my eyes, take a few grounding breaths, and invite Insomnia to take a seat.

The demon of Insomnia, with a capital “I”, is a big bright yellow blob with small observant eyes. It sits across fro me, observing me. I look into its eyes. What do I see? It looks like it feels sorry for me. There is no anger there, there is concern, and a hint of curiosity. It doesn’t know what to make of me. That makes two of us!

Insomnia doesn't speak. It observes me, looking uncertain. It wants to be accepted. I’m not sure what that implies for me. Do I have to accept a lifetime of disrupted sleep? The status quo? Bleary-eyed mornings? Again back on that anxiety train.

I ask Insomnia what it wants.

-“It can’t be power, you already have it”. He agrees.

-“Control?” Done.

-“What is the other side of power and control? Trust.”  The demon nods.

Trust. Trust Insomnia. Does this mean it’s trying to teach me something?

I have a lot to learn.

In my mind, I revisit my relationship with sleeping. I can easily rattle off the narrative of what lack of sleep keeps me from doing. Whenever I think I may not sleep, the litany of painful consequences springs immediately to mind. I won’t be functional, I say. I won’t be able to concentrate, I repeat to myself. I’ll be a mess, I am sure.

It occurs to me that I could reframe the question to perhaps find different answers. What can I do without sleep?

Walk, paint, dream, rest.  Were these things I made enough time for? During my encounter  with the Insomnia demon, he showed me what I did when he woke me up.

In adolescence, I painted. I would get up in the middle of the night and go to my father’s workshop in the basement.

In my twenties, the paint tubes and brushes I still had from my nocturnal painting sessions as a teenager sat unused. When insomnia reached out to me, I would get up in the night, and smoke on the balcony.

In my thirties, my life was a blur of activity as a working mother with two small children. Insomnia made my life even more difficult to manage. When I couldn’t sleep, I began to spin the story of the too-soon arriving morning routine. As I lay awake, I watched the clock with growing panic as the precious hours of rest I had available slipped away.

Eventually, I started getting up at night to write. I spilled my frustrations out on the page, wrote down my to-do list, speculated about ways to get through the ordeal ahead. Once I had vented, stories began to emerge. I wrote memories from my childhood, quirky essays about ordinary objects leading extraordinary adventures, and poetry.  I filled boxes and boxes of notebooks. These stories were born in my journal, then I typed them into my first computer. I saved them on floppy disks, then hard disks, on USB sticks. I moved them from our two-bedroom apartment to our first house, then again to the house in which I have lived for the past forty years.

So, why does Insomnia wake me up? I am writing, I am painting. What is next? Sharing.

It’s time to take the stories out of the boxes. It’s time to pick up the threads and start weaving the stories into a tapestry that looks like me, but that also looks a little so many of us. A tapestry that reveals the threads we share.