I am not sleeping well. This has happened periodically throughout my life, but with increasing frequency. It usually takes the form of falling asleep at a reasonable hour, waking anywhere between 1:00 to 3:00AM, then being unable to return to sleep until shortly before my alarm is about to go off. The end result is I am trying to get by on 2 or 3 hours of fitful sleep per night.
I am fervently resisting any chemical assistance since I fear it will impede whatever natural adaptations my body or mind might make otherwise (this may be erroneous thinking on my part). The thing is, when you reach a certain age, you begin to experience what are irreversible degradations anyway. The worry about impeding your body from adapting becomes less of a concern because in many cases, your body has given up adapting. Ingesting various chemicals becomes a question of extending a good quality of life for as long as you can.
But I'm not there with respect to sleep yet. My current thinking is that while nothing particularly urgent is bothering me, there are big questions lingering in my near future as I barrel towards retirement and senior citizenship and, with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company in bed, these are agitating my mind, mostly subconsciously. At whatever point in the next few years I find those questions resolved, if I still have trouble sleeping then it's pills for me until the end of the line. For now, I'll only take the softest of sleep aids and only in the direst of circumstances.
The related topic I wanted to touch on is my dreams. I cannot tell you a single dream I have had in my life. Not one. Literally every dream I have ever had has vanished from my memory. Oh, I remember that I had a dream; I sometimes remember a detail or two for a few seconds after I wake up but then any images simply vaporize. It's a very strange experience, but as far as I know it has had no deleterious effect on me.
Of late however, there has been a change. I still can't recall any images or details of my dreams, but I can recall a theme. This is even stranger. So while any details still vaporize I'm left with an impression of the big picture plot. And, though the setting changes, that plot always involves me needing to complete some task or activity and never being able to. Maybe I'm trying to drive somewhere where someone is waiting and I keep running into traffic or have an engine failure -- every issue gets resolved and then another pops up with the result being I wake up with the task undone.
It is just the oddest thing. I cannot recall any images or details, but I know the plot and theme. I know it starts out with an innocuous task to complete and spirals into chaos and frustration, the tasks never being completed. But I can't recall the specific tasks, the specific interruptions, or any people, places, or things. It's like a weird form of mental illness. There are people who can't remember faces -- they know who the people in their lives are, they see them every day, know their personal history with them, but for some bizarre reason of mental wiring, they can never recall their faces. In a small way, I now know what that feels like. I know what happens in my dreams, but I can't hold on to an image of it.
All this is apropos of nothing in particular and it's unlike me to share this sort of thing. I suppose if I ever find myself completely going off the rails into madness, this might be a clue to where it started.
