Sleep

Some time back I started to do the writing prompts at Laura's Writer's Journey Roadmap. This year I've not been very good at keeping up with the weekly prompts. I plan to change that in the New Year.

Although I've missed submitting them to the Laura's site I've made a record of all of the prompts so that I can work through those that I've missed. For the ones that I have missed I'm going to post them here, if anyone would like to comment then please feel free.

Last week's prompt was entitled prompt and this is what I wrote.

Sleep

“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level.”

–from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervates, published on 1605

 Tell me about your relationship with sleep. 

Sleep. Eight hours of lovely uninterrupted slumber.

Yeah! Really!

The last time I had that much sleep I was probably a baby.

I can’t remember when sleep and I fell out of love with each other. I have a feeling that it may have been when I was a teenager.

Way back then, as my memory reminds me, I had a period of insomnia that lasted three days. Every night I would go to bed and find myself denied entry to the realms of slumber. For three nights I would lie awake until everyone else was asleep and then turn on my bedroom light and read.

And read.

And read.

Yawn.

Until dawn had passed and I heard my parents stirring.

While they got their day started I would lie in bed for a while and then get up.

Three days before I got any sleep.

In the years since then I’ve managed to get a couple of hours’ solid sleep every night and then the rest of it is spent drifting in and out of sleep tossing and turning trying to get back to sleep or getting up to have a drink and do something to pass the time before I feel ready to go and try to get back to sleep.

Don’t get me wrong though, as much as it would be nice to have a full night’s sleep, my relationship with sleep has its upside. When I wake up in the middle of the night there’s a good chance that I will remember my dreams. Good ones or bad ones I get to remember them, and there have been some wonderful dreams.

Like the time I sacrificed myself by blowing up a planet in order to allow its inhabitants to escape an alien horde that wanted to destroy them, or the time I saved people from lava flowing across the landscape.

Even the nightmares aren’t too bad because over the years I’ve learned how to take control of a nightmare or if I’ve woken up how to drop back into that same nightmare but this time with me being in control and directing what happens. In my nightmares the monsters quickly learn to run away.

So a full night’s sleep may not be something that I’ve been blessed with but for what I miss out on there I make up for in other ways.