Sleeping Around
Some people fall asleep easily. I envy those people. My father often falls asleep on the sofa with the newspaper on his lap and his glasses perched on the end of his nose, or sometimes while supposedly watching television. He’ll snore loudly during one of the many crime dramas he likes to watch at night and my mother will have to wake him before going to bed. My father complains almost daily about not having slept the night before. “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” he says while rubbing his bald head. My mother says that, one night, she might leave him on the sofa to see if he’ll sleep there all night.
When my husband says he’s going to take a nap, he is usually able to fall asleep within seconds of laying down. I know he’s sleeping because his fingers start to twitch, then his arms, then his legs and finally his feet. I don’t know how he can sleep through that. Sometimes it wakes me up. I’m convinced that his twitching is one of the reasons he finds it so difficult to gain weight.
I have difficulty sleeping, especially napping. As soon as I lay down my mind starts racing. I’m a worrier by nature. Apparently, worrying is best done while trying to sleep. I refuse to take sleeping pills. I don’t want to add any pills to my list of addictions. Lost and Burt’s Bees Lip Balm are enough. Though I’ve never actually tried counting sheep, I don’t think it would work. Sheep are not particually sleep inducing creatures–all that baa-ing would keep me awake. I think that counting something a little slower, quieter, and less interesting might work better–like turtles (not sea turtles because they swim quite fast) or sloths. I think turtles are silent but I don’t know about sloths. A friend once told me that if I pictured my worries exploding in giant balls of light, that would help me sleep. I tried it and it didn’t work. It just gave me an awful headache.
My sleeping problems have lessened since getting married but they still haven’t gone away completely. I once saw a middle aged man sleeping while standing on a crowded subway train in Korea. I regard him as some kind of superhero, able to sleep anywhere, anytime! Now that’s a quality I respect.
