Mr. Sandman

I've been having sleepless nights recently. This last time, rather than feeling sorry for myself and angsting (can-of-wormsing that now), I actually had a brilliant chain of thoughts. Well, maybe not. But the fact remains, I did do something more useless than moaning about my life. I classified the types of sleepless nights I have. Yes, you all should be inhaling a collective gasp.

As I wrote in a previous post, some nights I stay up, doing nothing more than angsting. This provides a much needed emotional - release, 'specially when considering how much I bottle them up. I cry, I journal, I weep, and in short, I have a bad old time. Some nights, though, I don't release my emotions. This may be because I'm asleep.

On the occasions that I am not asleep, however, I am having one of two types of insomnia. My favorite type of insomnia is summarized by the phrase "the melody of mermaids keeps me awake at night," from Senses Capture, by Leave's Eyes. See, sometimes my creative juices get going right around midnight. It's on these nights that I stay up and write, draw, hum, notate, and emote into the wee hours of the mornings. Sometimes, it's lyrics to a song, or lines of a poem. Sometimes, it's new inspiration for one of my countless stories. And other times, I get the idea for a motif in a new musical composition. It's a fact of life that I physically cannot go to bed until I've recorded all of these new inspirations. So I sit in my room, scribbling madly on a piece of paper, listening to my music, and the product may be music clefs, pictures, poetic twists of a phrase, imponderable questions, or lines from a story. Good times.

The third type of insomnia, however, is much, much more mundane. It is pure sleeplessness. And it was this type of sleepless night that I've been having this past week. The ones where you stare at the ceiling for hours, feeling the sweet touch of sleep brush against your consciousness, only to be frightened away as you reach out to it for relief. Those are the nights where you just think. And think, and ponder, and pray. Ah well, such is the life.

Count your sheep,
B