“When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake” – Fight Club

Depending on how well you know me, you may already understand the title to this blog. It’s about time I explain it for those of you who don’t.

Since high school, I haven’t slept well. Actually, I thought I slept just fine until sometime during high school or college I started talking to people about their sleep. I was absolutely floored to find out a few things about sleep that don’t apply to me at all.

1. Falling asleep takes 20 minutes or less
2. Waking up during the night doesn’t happen often, but if it does, they fall back asleep quickly
3. They wake up feeling refreshed
4. Having control over your dreams is uncommon (actually, really uncommon)
5. Dreams are often mundane

The more I talked to people, the more I was generally shocked. I take generally between 45 and 120 minutes to fall asleep. I wake up 5 – 25 times a night, and while this didn’t used to be as much of a problem, in the last year I’ve been having a much harder time falling back asleep. I don’t think I’ve ever felt refreshed upon waking up. I’m not even sure I believe people who say they feel refreshed when they wake up because it just seems so unbelievable.

And when I do sleep, I lucid dream. I’m going to make up some numbers since I have never tried to track this accurately, but I would say that I am aware I’m dreaming about 90% of the time and have control (to varying degrees) over what’s going on in my dream about 70% of the time. Most of my dreams are pretty intense. Full on adventures in crazy fantasy lands where I can fly and there’s some goal I’m trying to accomplish. Or people/things are trying to kill me. Or there’s some puzzle to solve.

It’s pretty exhausting.

I feel like I’m tired all the time even though my body is just used to it. I’ve been in  situations where I’ve dreamed something so real that I’ve woken up still believing it actually happened. I’ll check a drawer a day later to get something that doesn’t exist. I’ve even forgotten if a conversation I had with someone was real.

Sometimes, the lines between what happened in real life and what happened in a dream get blurred.

I have finally started down the path of getting all of this sorted out. I had my first sleep study a few weeks ago to rule out sleep apnea as a cause of insomnia. There’s probably more sleep studies in my future.

But the thing that is guaranteed to make me instantly annoyed with you to ask me what I’ve tried and to have me try your home remedy. I promise you, I’ve tried most of them. I’m sure they work for people who on occasion take 30 – 40 minutes to fall asleep. I’m sure it’s even worked for you before.

If I could fix my sleeping problems with hot tea, reading before bed, no ‘electronic screens’ for 30 minutes before bed, a darkened bedroom, a quiet bedroom, melatonin, sleep aids, Zzzquil, more exercise, healthy eating, not eating immediately before going to bed, going to bed around the same time every night, no alcohol, etc. etc. etc.
…don’t you think I would have tried that already?

Oh yeah, I have. Because I can’t sleep and it totally sucks.

I promise you, my insomnia isn’t fixed by a combination of all these little tricks.  I am though, currently trying the ‘if you can’t sleep, just stop trying to force yourself to sleep’ method because, well, why not keep trying things? I’m a little desperate.

Anyway, this isn’t my most motivational or uplifting post. I suppose it is simply an ‘explanation post’ of where the title came from. Lucid dreams are sometimes called waking dreams since you are ‘awake’ within your dream. I want to take control of my life the way I take control of my dreams. I don’t want to float through life watching things happen to me the way a lot of people feel when dreaming. I want to wake up every day feeling like I’m in control of what happens to me, because that’s what makes me happy.

And with that, it’s probably time to (attempt) to get some sleep.