I'm dreaming of .....

"Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord, my soul to keep
If there's a sound that me awakes
I pray the computer is not affected by any potential power outage so I can sit around and blog until I feel sleepy again."

The storm woke me up. Well, who am I kidding? I find it hard to sleep through the night anyway. I have already investigated the dripping noises that I hear. My magic bag is heating.

While I wait, I will sit and blog blog blog.

What makes sleep distubance worse is knowing that I have to get up in just a few more hours to start the day. I find myself saying "Hurry up and relax. You gotta get up soon. " Usually that doesn't work too well. So I begin the process of elimination of my relaxation techniques . Hopefully one of them will work before too long. I'd hate to end up with 29 minutes of REM sleep before the alarm.

Sometimes I think of Bible characters and run through the stories in my mind. "Samson Samson, the Philistines are upon you. " Now there's a guy who didn't have trouble sleeping. I wonder if he snored. What side of the bed do you think he slept on? Maybe if I switched sides with my husband, I would sleep better. . "Wake up hun, I want to switch sides of the bed with you in case I can sleep better on that side." No I guess that won't work this time

Sometimes I just know I would be able to get back to sleep if the bed sheets weren't all scrumpled and the pillow wasn't so warm. In my non-scientific study, there are scrumplers and non-scrumplers. The scrumplers (husband) are not bed makers. They like to slide in exactly where they left off. If that means that the zipper of the duvet cover is at their nose, then so be it. The non-scrumplers (me) find it hard to relax with zippers on their nose. The best solution for them is to get up and Flouff (scientific term) the covers so that everything gets straightened out including the "oh-I-didn't -realize-we-had- a -top-sheet" items. Turning the pillows over is also part of this routine. Straightened out sheets and cool pillows make it easier to trick yourself into believing you'll be back to sleep in no time. Funny, the scrumplers don't really appreciate the non-scrumplers efforts. Especially in the middle of the night.

If sleep still doesn't come, I bring out the mind games.

"I am like my mother and don't wake up until ten o'clock no matter what time I get up. . so..., if I won't be awake until ten, technically I am still asleep, even though I am awake. " Believe me, those mind games get old really fast.

Waking up in the middle of the night makes it hard on the other end of the alarm clock to "rise and shine". The day I knew I was in trouble was the day that I got myself up by promising "if you get up now, you can have a nap later". Now that doesn't even make any kind of logical sense. [Kind of like when I had a diary as a teenager and wrote in there "I felt like giving up today. But what's the use?"]

Occasionally I will get up and come downstairs and put some laundry in or check my emails. Have a drink of something, make some toast, you know, nothing that disturbs the rest of the family. I wish I was more organized and would make the next night's supper, but honestly, I think that is not really a great relaxation technique. Then I'd have to think!

If it's just too much bother to get out of bed when I am awoken [awakened?...woken up?] by the storm, or the traffic, [or the lack of storms, or the lack of traffic] I have a few more tricks up my nightshirt. One is to say as many memory verses as I can in alphabetical order. I don't remember getting to "Z" with that. But you have to be committed to that one, because it can really frustrate you and make you more awake if you can't think of a verse after "In everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known to God". But then again, it could remind you to pray which is another good sleep-inducing technique. The disciples falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane have taught me a thing or two about that trick.

Sometimes, I switch on the light and read. Now that's a solution a husband can love! Not only do you have light streaming into the room but you are making noise , finding your glasses, turning the pages, laughing out loud, [or crying if it's a sad story]. Which leads me to the questions: Why don't they make book pages out of material that doesn't make noise when you turn the page? And why do pages only stick to one another in the middle of the night?

In the interest of non-disturbance, I bought myself a book lamp for Christmas one year. . It disturbed him more than actually switching on the light and flouffing the sheets. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had to fiddle with the silly thing because it kept falling off the book. "Pardon me hun, I seem to have lost my book lamp. Oh there it is! It slipped off the page and onto your head."

Yes, sleep is an elusive butterfly for me. Maybe I'll put that on my Christmas wish list. Sing it with me everyone! "All I want for Christmas is A full night's sleep" What are the chances of that?? BEEP BEEP BEEP. Oh, there's the magic bag. Nighty night. Morny morn. Whatevah.