Wide awake at 3:33am. 3:33am. The past few days. It’s always “feels like 7 or 8 or 9” and “did I oversleep my alarm” and panic sets in then glance outside and see there’s no sun yet and so it must not be that late it must be just before sunrise no it’s 3:33am…
Adrenaline rushes through my veins. Dream dissolves instantly, and I don’t remember what it was, but something in it, or maybe a baby swirming in my stomach, or maybe both, causes me to wake up.
Eyes wide open.
Try to shut them tight to fall back asleep. Try to not think about everything that needs to be done. Try to come up with some entirely unlikely but could be non-fiction plot line that’s suitable for dream state entry-point to convince my brain it never woke up in the first place. Like I do every single night to fall alseep. But awake brain says that plot line isn’t logical at all and reverts to its beginning over and over seeking to find plausible scenarios, accomplishing the exact opposite of the goal. By 4am I am wide awake, filled with enough momentary energy to jump off the wall.
Before pregnancy I never had a problem sleeping through the night. Falling asleep was always a challenge, with my mind racing and similar challenges of forcing myself into dream state with a thousand renditions of a few recurring plot lines in constant evolution that must be plausible enough to get my mind to accept them so it can drift to sleep. But once I was asleep, I was asleep until morning. Without an alarm, I could easily sleep 8–9 hours and no more.
The days of sleeping through the night are long gone. My last trimester of pregnancy will undoubtedly get worse, before it gets better. And just when my body is ready to sleep, I’ll have a baby waking me up in regular intervals throughout the night. At least then I’ll be so exhausted, I doubt I’ll have to rely on crafting impossible-yet-completely-feasible storylines in my head to fall asleep. Because I can’t count sheep or meditate or anything else, my options are rewrites of never-to-be-written-or-shared fiction or running through an Asana/work task list in my head over and over and over and over again until I fall asleep — and usually 1 is better than 2 of achieving this objective as it causes slightly less anxiety.
I imagine when baby is born I’ll have a 3rd option which is worrying about baby, which won’t be any more productive or useful, but at least will make sense.
I wonder how other — normal — people fall asleep.
I imagine those with less active minds can just perhaps read a book and drift off, or a basic meditation exercise would make it easy to shut down. Few normal humans require plausible plots on repeat running through a thousand scenarios and what ifs and psychological maybes until I tire this crazy mind of my out spinning in circles and eventually sleep occurs. The plot that goes no where. The story that’s designed to have no middle and certainly no ending.
Still, this strategy doesn’t work at 3:33am. So I write. So I write to try to quiet my mind so I can get in a few more hours of sleep and wake up mildly well rested to start the day. The energy now at 4:20 is slipping. I’ll attempt to close my eyes. I’ll attempt to listen to the loud hum of the in-window air conditioner. I’ll attempt to return to the recurring storyline that goes nowhere and everywhere all at the same time, in the hope it might help me get just a few more hours of sleep, or at least progress the current story a second forward to its next psychologically plausible plot point.
life with interest 