Deprived of sleep and starting to go out of my very tiny mind!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Sleep sleep glorious sleep. I love sleep and sleep loves me. When sleep leaves me, as it has done recently, I crumble like a man who’s lost his lover.

We all have our Achilles heel, and mine is sleep, or rather, the lack thereof. Given a good night’s kip I can face anything that the universe might throw at me, but after even one night’s dodgy slumber I’m lost.

If my recent lack of sleep were the result of a hectic social life I’d be delighted, but I’ve not been drinking. I’ve not been to bed late. I’ve been a good little scribbler, who has for the last six nights woken up somewhere between 2am and 4.30am each day.

If I was writing this in April I might understand my rhythms better. Each year as the sun rises earlier and earlier, I tend to wake up at ridiculously impractical times. To be honest, although it’s a pain when that happens, I don’t mind too much. It feels somewhat primal, as if the bear that lurks inside me is emerging from hibernation, greeting the new season with an eagerness and desire to make the most of all the daylight hours.

Yet as we enter what the Irish rather optimistically call ‘Spring’, my early waking has nothing to do with the fact that the sun is rising a little earlier each morning. To this Londoner, February is still Winter. Even though the sap is rising in the willow whips outside; even though there are buds appearing on the soft fruit bushes and a tiny creep of light is appearing in the early evenings, as if somebody has left the dark door of Winter ajar, I cannot pretend that my present sleep deprivation is driven by the seasons.

As any true insomniac will tell you, lack of sleep feeds upon itself. Aware of the fact that you have not slept well, you go to bed dreading another bad night, which creates in itself a certain disastrous self-fulfilling prophecy.

Years ago I used to work alongside a true insomniac and it was a terrible thing to see the effect the condition had upon him.

The moment he walked in the door I was able to tell whether he had failed to sleep the night before. His shoulders would be slumped forward, his pallor turned grey and the fire of positivity that usually lurked just behind his eyes was replaced with a resigned sadness; his usual passion for the job transformed into a dreadful acceptance that exhaustion was to be his lot for the foreseeable future.

Thankfully I am not an insomniac, as at least 340 times each year I fall asleep somewhere between 10.30pm and 11.30pm, and (apart from the middle aged male middle of the night peeper) wake around 6.30am or 7am. For that I give much thanks, as those seven or eight hours of restorative slumber allow me to function as . . . well, I was going to say ‘a normal human being’, but I suppose that’s for others to judge!

Were this a particularly stressful time I would better understand, but it’s not. Yet for the last six nights I have had such an active brain that after waking in the middle of the night, there is no more rest to be had.

To read the whole/entire/all of the article, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.