The stages of sleep to console an insomniac

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was Christy Moore – back of the glory days of his Delirium Tremens – who once sang of petitioning St Anthony with the offer of a tenner to help him find some sleep.

We’ve all been that soldier, who’d give a lot more than ten quid if only we could clear our heads of the stupid thoughts and worries and get a bit of kip.

But the harder you try to will yourself to slumber land, the less chance it has of ever happening.

The awful irony is that the people who most think about sleep are the people who get to enjoy it least – the insomniacs who spend half the night trying in vain to doze off.

They stare at the ceiling with the thoughts swirling around in their addled brain, counting thousands of sheep like Larry Goodman once counted cattle crossing back and over the border; willing sleep on themselves – and then finally dozing off just minutes before the alarm rings to herald a new day.

When you think about it – and this line of thought is the preserve of those who are involuntarily wide awake at four in the morning – there’s a life cycle to sleep that you cannot buck.

You start out with the sleep of the innocent; the new born baby who does nothing more than cry when they’re hungry and sleep when they’re tired – or when you overdose them on gripe water.

Then they graduate to the sleep of the just; the rest enjoyed by children who can’t help themselves slipping quietly into the land of nod where they dream of princesses or superheroes who live in castles, and the world is truly at peace.

Because they have nothing to worry about, other than the monsters under the bed – no mortgages, electricity bills, college fees, rows at work that keep the rest of us tossing and turning between the sheets.

Then come the teenage years when that sleep pattern changes and they spend every night balking at going to bed and every morning refusing to get out of it – particularly if the only reason for getting up is to go to school.

There is only one solution to this and financial considerations ensure it’s not open to everyone – you have to move to a friendlier time zone where you’re getting up in the morning, only it’s midday at home, and you go to bed at a reasonable hour, except it’s one in the morning Irish time.

Following on from teenage sleep is the sleep of the inebriated – a state of slumber induced by alcohol which may render your eyes closed and your mouth wide open, but will never leave you refreshed in the morning.

There are other characteristics that characterise this phase as well – the snore, for example, that not alone keeps the rest of house awake but can actually wake yourself up, such is the strength of it.

And there’s the dribble, the result of dozing off in the armchair with your head tilted forward so that you wake with a shallow puddle of drool down your good top.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.