Sleep

Sleep has never come easy to me. I don't understand how or why it works (who does?) so the act of falling asleep is something I've always been uneasy with. Since my teens, I have had to talk myself to sleep - literally talk nonsense to myself until sleep takes over - unless I can listen to an audiobook, music or a movie in bed. This might suggest an insecurity with sleeping alone, but until I left the family home I shared a bedroom with my sister Alba, who was always asleep long before I even felt settled. It has been the same with every friend I have had stay the night in my room, and every partner with whom I have shared a bed - with the notable exception of Leo, when we shared a sleeping space. Perhaps under my influence, even he cannot sleep without an audiobook these days.

Yet here is what I find most odd about my need for auditory stimuli - I cannot
remain asleep without one. If I have company, which in most cases renders my usual sleep-finding techniques impossible, I will wake up frequently throughout the night. Sometimes my eyes will pop open for a minute or less before I doze again; other times I will stare into the dark until someone else wakes up.

Some nights I do not sleep at all. Roughly one week in six - again, true since I was a teenager - I enter that surreal, distant daze in which I lose depth perception and the world becomes an artwork by Takashi Murakami: "superflat". Tiredness becomes bodily irrelevant yet all-consuming. My actions become automatic, limbs moving on muscle memory alone. I am there, but not there; physically there but mentally far away, in a dense and foggy place.

For the other five weeks in the cycle, my sleep would be as normal, provided the absence of silence in which to sleep. Yet this too changed when I was first prescribed antidepressants. Now the cycle has become bipolar; I have weeks where I sleep too much. I have started to lose entire days to my bed, and once awake I am constantly weary - yet not in the insomniac superflat sense. All three dimensions remain present, but I cannot summon the energy to function. Where movement becomes automatic when not sleeping, it becomes impossible when I can do nothing but. Going to the bathroom becomes Herculean, feeding myself unfathomable. Hunger makes me weaker and wearier still, yet my mind goes into overdrive whilst my body refuses to cooperate - in true opposition to my insomniac phases.

Periods of hypersomnia are only one of two changes my medication has wrought upon my sleep. Previously, my phases of insomnia were preceded by several nights of very vivid dreams, from which I could recall details of people, conversations and surroundings for days afterward. Now, these dreams are constant. They are rarely unpleasant and almost never carry a theme from one night to the next - except for a few nights last month, in which I dreamed of being late for school each night, albeit in different circumstances and company in each one. I feel sorry for people who claim they do not dream, dislike to dream or cannot remember their dreams. I enjoy dreaming and deciphering their symbology upon awakening. On some occasions I have been capable of lucid dreaming, an experience as fascinating as it is amusing. Unlike the effect of hypersomnia, I have no complaints about my enhanced dreaming abilities.

One last observation: whatever I listen to as I sleep has no intrusion whatsoever on my dreams. One of my particular favourite "sleepytime stories" is the inimitable Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter novels, yet I have never dreamed of so much as a single house elf.

I wonder, though, how common a cyclical sleep pattern like this is. I am trouble enough to my doctor already without raising an issue that truly only affects me two weeks of every six. There are bigger fish to fry first.