Posts tagged with "sleep" - Faerye Net

Birth order and sleep?

2010-11-18T22:44:42+00:00

I’m currently watching over the baby monitor as my sister and brother-in-law take in a show. When they left, they asked me to go in and check that the younger nephew was sleeping in five minutes, which I did. Fast asleep. And this, mind you, with his door cracked and next door, his older brother keeping up a running dialogue with himself about whether he wanted to be a construction worker or an “old-time car driver”. Yes, he was supposed to be asleep. No, he didn’t want to be.

It made me wonder if those two perennial favorites of psychological study, birth order and sleep, have ever been considered together. When the older boy was this age, surely, we tiptoed around as he slept? The younger one is learning to sleep through all sorts of outbursts and upset. It might be interesting to find out if many older siblings are, like Ryan, light sleepers. For myself, a younger sibling, I am a deep diver into the sea of sleep. Probably a specious theory, but perhaps worth looking up tomorrow, when I’ve completed my night’s dive.

Alarums

2010-11-11T13:41:40+00:00

At 6-something this morning, I surfaced from sleep, confused and still dripping with dreams. I didn’t know why. Oh. A sharp meeping sound. After a few repetitions and some heavy thinking had convinced me that this noise had nothing to do with my dream, or the RPG character I was thinking about before I fell asleep, I decided it must be a very small fire, a very mild case of CO poisoning, or an alarm low on battery. Sleepy and probably hilarious information-gathering steps led me to the final conclusion.

The alarm in question was in my room. Of course. I lugged a folding chair in and studied the cream-on-cream instructions. I pressed to silence. One ear-bloodying meep. Then, after the interval precisely calculated to give you a few seconds of sweet hope, another meep. I pressed to silence again. Three attacks, then one more, then silence. I had a feeling my travails were not over, but I was also very sleepy and my feet were very cold. I tweeted my woes and returned to sleep. At 8:14, of course, MEEP.

MEEP.

Now, I am almost certain that I’ve blogged about smoke alarms meeping at midnight before, because two houses ago we had a perfect epidemic. But searches are not availing me, so we’ll all have to settle for déja-lu. At any rate, I could clearly see the path I was beginning: too sleepy to solve the problem, I would postpone it, like the devil’s snooze button, until it woke me again, and again. I would never feel rested, so I would never wake up fully, never end my night’s sleep, never be free of the MEEP.

So I carefully bestirred myself, carried the chair back in, took the alarm off the wall, carried it downstairs, put on slippers, cautiously opened the cabinet from which it takes 15 minutes to roust a cat (I thought I heard Qubit behind me, but the MEEP lacerated her ears and sent her running), opened my big trunk o’ games, silenced the alarm, put it in, closed up, went back upstairs, replaced the chair, heard a desolate moaning, located Qubit to make sure she wasn’t trapped (she was just scared of the MEEP), petted her into complacency, and went back to bed.

Only then did I check twitter for commiseration, and found out that Ryan has 9V batteries. Sigh.

All night

2007-05-15T00:11:21+00:00

Right now, I am not working. I am not creating, synthesizing, planning, doing anything that will help or advance the work I have to do before today. And yet, I cannot go to sleep, cannot watch a movie or take a bath, anything whole-heartedly self-serving, self-feeding. It is obvious that I feel, beneath the me that makes rational judgments, that these moments, these wasted moments on the path to work, are also work.

How so? Is it ground so thoroughly into my psyche that work is pain, that pain is holy, that self-sacrifice is holiest of all? So that when I hold myself away from the simple, ineffable pleasure of sleep, every second of that self-denial counts, somehow, on a scale I don’t even believe in? Another minute wasted, burned like an offering.

How ridiculous, this idea that work is pain. It can be, and is sometimes, even when you love your work as they tell us artists must. But when it comes to you, when you slip between the minutes and find your place, you are happy and productive and all-powerful, and you are both surprised and not when the car starts across the street and draws your eyes to the sunlit window, when you realize it is now today. Will this minute I have burned with you lure the work closer? Can I find a way to simply pull the state of work down on me, over my head like a quilt against intruding sunlight? Or must I always, as I do now, work ever closer to it, brushing away the minutes that lie between me and living?

Curiouser and curiouser...

2007-05-14T07:51:18+00:00

I am getting better and better, over time, at pulling all-nighters. This seems contrary to the laws of Nature. I wonder if, when I am an old woman, I will have ceased entirely to sleep, and will wander the world with dark circles as large as my cheeks, moving imperceptibly between reality and dream?

I have kibbled up the speak-talks

2004-06-25T11:24:19+00:00

I have kibbled up the speak-talks that come from my mouth. In my headplace there are thinks that have form and fluid, howso when they tiptoe from the dribble lip they are brokens. Is that the coffee is adulterer of syrup and foamy, theretwo not make fluids the tick-talk? Is picketty nonsense all the throw-out of my crane now? I have tripping in my tongue, and knot in lacey poem paths. I have silence when I speaks and speakses when I try quiet. I have blicky-blicky stick talk tongue and the fractal-fracture jars of words under my hair.

Things that go BUMP in the night

2004-04-13T15:59:43+00:00

Ah, Spring. Not too long ago it was that we moved into our house under the veil of Winter, and I slowly trained my paranoid brain to succumb to sleep despite the many creakings of the settling abode. Not that, of course, an apartment complex does not incur the same creaking and settling; but in an apartment, where from time to time the sound of Hindi pop music or the Mormons next door arguing drifts across one’s consciousness, one can never entertain the pleasant suspicion that one is, in fact, alone. Not so in a house, where the presence of an unaccounted person is a matter for alarm and the preparation of bludgeoning weapons; and therefore it was with great difficulty that I reined in my active imagination in those first few months in the house, and kept it from painting bogeymen and burglars at every ominous sound.

This task done, the Spring arrives, the friendly white noise of the rain subsides, the morning sun creeps into the sleeping hours, and plagues the house with cacaphonous thermal expansion. The squirrels get frisky and express it with freefall jumps onto the roof above my head; the occasional raccoon takes it into his head to make sinister scrabbling and digitigrade noises across my deck or shingles. I lie in bed, re-training my mind to ignore the multitude of sounds it insists are a matter of life and death. Minutes tick by, creaks fade into ominous footfalls, a branch scratches a window somewhere, a hollow thump sounds from the deck. Perhaps I’d sleep better with a scimitar by the bed.