Poll: Okay body.... Sleep!

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Yeah, its that time of the night. Work approaching in the morning at a rate too uncomfortable to mention, laying in bed trying to will myself asleep. Nothing.

How regularly do you guys struggle with the act of falling asleep? For me its frequent when there is just entirely too much to think about and my brain won't shut up. It's like a fever but I hesitate to look into sleep medication when I know I'm already in for a hard wake up and cold shower.

[sub]Posting on the Escapist isn't helping it of course. <.<[/sub]

Throwing up a poll for whatever. Sleep damn me! >:/

 

[an annoyed writer]

Kinda hard for me to answer with just one of those, so I'll just say what parts of sleep have been the most corrupted: trying to sleep, and the nightmares that come with. Nothing like seeing gory simulacra of former friends die over and over again to really make sleeping an oh-so-happy thing... -.-

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

I suffer from insomnia, which makes falling asleep hard, but at the same time I suffer hypotension/low blood pressure in my sleep, which makes waking up hard too.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

I really wanted to vote for two options since I take forever to fall asleep AND get up in the morning.
I'm all too familiar with thoughts chasing each-other around until I'm dizzy.
Especially those embarrassing things that happened 5,10,15 years ago and all the regrets I have from mistakes or missed opportunities.

The getting to sleep part I've partially solved. I just read until I can't keep my eyes open anymore.
Through sheer force of will I've managed to get up on time for 5 years now. That still sounds incredible to me.

 

[SweetShark]

I am not really struggle to sleep. When you are so much tired with so many things you need to do for work and enjoyment, you will feel at some point sleepy.
I will admit drink a little red wine help you to relax. But I digress, I don't really need it.

Btw, I have a lot of dreams.

 

[Kyrian007]

That's easy. I'm one of those super annoying people who sleep lightly and wake up instantly alert and bright and ready to do get going. Waking up is never a problem, and provided I got enough sleep I feel good and refreshed right away. Its almost the real life version of fallout's "You wake feeling well rested."

Now falling asleep, that's the hard part. I have to be cool (65 to 71 degrees F) and in complete darkness. If I can see, I can't sleep. And the worst part... I work 3rd shift, I have to achieve those conditions while going to bed about 11 AM.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I feel your pain buddy.

I NEVER fall asleep straight away these days (last time I recalled doing that was many years ago, maybe in my early teens before I went to Disney World cos after that trip I had major jet lag).

Basically, I go to bed around 11 or 10.30 but I never fall alseep within that hour. Well ok it doesn't help that my parent are still up and they go to bed 30min- 1 hour after I go to bed but it still the same when they're not around.

Even when I do fall alseep, I'm the oppersite of a heavy sleeper like my bro (we're always the oppersite) as I'm light headed when alseep. I swear if a mice try to move about in my room, I will wake up as if a bomb had went off!

Yeah I too find it hard to stop thinking of anything when trying to fall alseep.

It is extremely rare that I do fall alseep normally but that when I was super tried like one time I went from work from 6am til 6pm!

 

[GeneralChaos]

But I don't need to know the answer. I just recite to myself, over and over, until I can choose sleep: It all adds up to normality.

 

[Barbas]

I have that problem sometimes, when I let my mind wander, so I just prod it in a different direction and that usually helps. It's all right. Pretend I'm cradling you gently in my strong appendages, like a giant prawn cradles its young. There, now don't you feel relaxed and soporific? No? Well, consider the plight of the noble and independent llama, commonly mistaken for its close cousin, the more skittish alpaca: http://modernfarmer.com/2015/09/difference-between-llama-and-alpaca/

Alpacas have becoming popular in western countries for their grazing efficiency and soft, renewable fibre, which is considered a luxury item. Mmm, feel those soft microns! As a relatively young industry in the UK, alpaca farming is still gathering momentum, so while these odd creatures attract a great deal of attention now, they may be considered quite commonplace in smaller English pastures within the next several decades.

As an emergency measure, perhaps watching the following will cause your brain to shut down from sheer disbelief:


Actually, I think I might watch that myself; I always enjoy Kermode's reviews and raaaaaa

a aa a . !DNEGJXy y y

 

[lacktheknack]

"Have you tried reading a Bible?" -me, a missionary

In all seriousness, I used to have ridiculous insomnia, but found out that ASMR exists and I began being able to fall asleep on a dime by running a video in the background somewhere.

The downside is that after I started doing that, sometimes if I don't have that going on in the background I've somehow gone into sleep paralysis from a wakeful state. THAT is some nasty stuff right there. You're laying there and then suddenly everything's needles and pins and endless whispering and you can't move despite being fine literally five seconds before. Wakes you the hell up when you recover.

 

[Thyunda]

Falling asleep is the worst part for me. I have never gone to bed and fallen asleep within a reasonable timeframe. I'm just incapable. It doesn't matter how tired I am, there's always going to be some reason why I'm not asleep.

The most obvious one is my eczema - since I'm continually itching all over and I'm hypersensitive to basically anything that has contact with my skin, it's pretty understandable that my hair or beard is going to itch my ears and face and bother me, or a tiny piece of something on the sheet is going to drive me completely insane - but those things I've dealt with my whole life, they can be ignored. Sometimes I'm on a good day and my skin is pretty smooth and unbroken so I don't feel it as much.
Then I'm not sure what the excuse is. Things get even worse if I stay up. 3am is the magic hour. It seems like I reach a particular stage of tiredness where my brain starts misfiring and causing me to wake up from drifting off with a start. Like someone's just been standing over me. Worse still, I start hallucinating from the tiredness and when I first open my eyes from being woken up by my shitty brain, everything looks wrong somehow. My backpack, which is sitting against a suitcase on my floor, appeared to be the size of a child, and only after repeated blinks did it return to actual backpack size. This happens with things that aren't there at all - large spiders appear on the walls, and silhouettes of people appear in the room, and I have to blink furiously at them to get them to leave.

Keeps me in a constant state of alert wakefulness, despite my eyelids trying to shut. It's a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and it's usually easier to just wait till dawn to fall asleep.

 

[Poetic Nova]

I actually try to put off sleeping as much as possible, I'm dealing with nightmares myself.
The worst thing is that it flipped my sleeping schedule entirely and most of the time I sleep from 4AM untill 3PM or so.

 

[The Harkinator]

This is how it usually goes:

"Okay body, sleep."

Body: Yep, we're tired all the time, so let's sleep.

Brain: WHAT UP BITCHES! WHO WANTS TO PONDER THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE?

"No! I'm tired."

Body: Come on brain, tomorrow you'll be wishing we went to sleep now.

Brain: ALRIGHT FINE, WE'LL DO SOMETHING LESS DEEP. HERE'S A LIST OF YOUR 25 BIGGEST REGRETS IN THE PAST TWO YEARS. ENJOY.

"Now I'm sad, I wish I could have done those things differently."

Brain: LET'S PLAY OUT EVERY SCENARIO RIGHT NOW.

Body: Guys, it's three in the morning. We really need to sleep.

Every night. You're not alone, there's millions of us who spend a sizeable amount of time between turning off the lights and closing our eyes to actually falling asleep.

 

[Pyrian]

The hardest part of getting to sleep is getting my child to sleep.

Samuel L. Jackson reads Go the **** to Sleep (NSFW) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk9Akeby12s]

 

[Fijiman]

The hardest part for me is usually getting into a comfortable position long enough that I don't feel the need to move again until I'm fully asleep. Usually takes between twenty minutes to an hour depending on a great number of things.

 

[sageoftruth]

For me, I'd say waking up (most of the time). The time I go to bed at night seems irrelevant. How I wake up is always decided randomly. Sometimes I feel rested, most of the time I wish I had more hours to sleep.

Going to bed usually isn't a problem for me. My imagination seems to be strongest at night, and you can do some interesting things with your imagination *wink *wink.

 

[RJ 17]

Especially those embarrassing things that happened 5,10,15 years ago and all the regrets I have from mistakes or missed opportunities.

Woo-hoo! So I'm not the only one this happens to!

Seriously....I'm haunted by moves I should have made in chess tournaments back in high school...and that was over a decade ago. o.o

 

[The Great JT]

The timing on this poll is funny, I was having problems falling asleep last night. Anyway, yeah, sometimes I just don't fall asleep. I find flipping on the TV to something like cartoons and putting the volume really low helps. Normally I fall asleep fine, it's just a case of something keeps me awake.

 

[Jeremy Dawkins]

I have trouble getting to sleep, and I wake up a few times a night, sometimes to go to the bathroom, sometimes just cause. The worst is not knowing what time it is, or if I can get back to sleep, because if I look at the clock, I'll never get back to sleep.

 

[Elfgore]

I had trouble going to sleep for the longest time, then about two years ago I found out the best way to go to sleep, at least for me. Shut of every light, turn off any noise that isn't white noise, and day-dream. Put yourself into a story you're reading, a TV show, whatever really. I personally find making myself near god-like makes it all the easier, no worries, no nothing.