Clock; 1.44 a.m.

I can’t sleep.

This is a rare occurrence of insomnia. I used to be prone to it, but for the past few years (perchance due to a dwindling state of mind) I’ve been able to sleep soundly and surely, and I take it as a sign of a good turnaround.

Insomnia (for me, at least) is not where one finds the inability to sleep due to excessive remnants in energy and freshness. Rather, the lethargy and overall yearn to sleep is there, eminent and strong, yet the body fails to rest, and the mind fails to close, and what’s left is to will away the stagnating clinging of troubles or thoughts that refuses you your sleep.

I said troubles or thoughts, but not every occurrence is due to certain problems that plague the mind. Sometimes it’s just the simple act of thinking that keeps me awake, whatever that was in mind. It’s stupid, and obviously something I feel is easily cast away at a whim, but I guess things don’t work well enough for me. So the cogs continue to turn, rambling and loud and screechy, working on thoughts one doesn’t even need to think about.

I’ve had things worse sometimes, like not being able to sleep a wink until forced to give up, and finding myself cooking a very early breakfast and finding things to do to pass the time. Normally time passes very slowly then, and I may even try to sleep, but it wouldn’t come and there wouldn’t be anything to do; no TV for fear of waking the parents. No books to the mind as numb and heavy with exhaustion. No video games, no internet (none back then, except for dial-up, which was too costly for me to afford in order to will away times of less importance) and definitely no one to talk to.

Only silence, darkness, and the lulling calls of sleep; malice and cruel in its alluring tease. But I just couldn’t bloody sleep.

With time to spare and little to do, I did something a kid with consciousness and boredom could conjure; I imagined. I remembered telling myself stories to sleep. Sounds crazy, I guess, but it started when I closed my eyes and make a sentence and see how it goes. Most times, if the story is nice, I repeat on that same scene and feel the ease of mind, the loosening in the rough grip of thoughts. Then it was just pictures, images, moving and coloured or discoloured, and sometimes I fell asleep.

This tactic still works, especially if I’m too miffed up or troubled to go to sleep. Start a sentence and see where it’ll take me. Sometimes the stories I wrote come from there, but it was back then. Today my stories come from the realm of day where the monotony of waiting in places full of life took place, where words float around ready for me to grab. Still, there were always the ones that began in the midst of the night, above a snoring brother, where everything was muffled by the door and the pillow, and where the shadows come to life behind the curtain so long as passing light would give it motion.

With the laptop and the internet now, I wouldn’t have to do much to get me distracted enough to sleep. Now that I write this down I feel at ease, and I’ll probably fall asleep when I retreat to the bed.

I might not be telling me a story tonight… but as far as I know the way things work, I just might. Yeah, I might…