Sheep Counting

In the middle of the night I woke up and ...  boom!...I was wide awake. I got up, walked around, attended to bathroom needs, played solitaire on my iPod, and settled back into my bed and waited for that blessed wave of sleep to wash over me.  Guess what? It didn't arrive as I planned. I just tossed, turned, plumped pillows, straightened duvets and nothing, no sleep.

When this happens I get a bit edgy.  Do I have insomnia?  What is that?  If I have to ask I don't have it. Am I depressed?  Now there is a stupid question.  I would never let a depressed episode go unnoticed. Perhaps I woke up because of some  sort of organ energy imbalance.  In Eastern medicine there is a belief that different organs are more or less active at different times.  Feh! I don't really believe that. Lung energy is not the reason I'm awake, or is it?

After lying there for some time, actually about thirty minutes, I was on my back, calm and not sleeping, so I decided that I would count sheep. I then started wondering when this tedious task became synonymous with an aid to inducing sleep. Then I remembered that in India they don't count sheep - perhaps sheep are not so plentiful, though we count sheep in the Bronx and I remember no sheep anywhere near my block of flats.  In India they count stars.  I can see how this would be more difficult since we see so few stars over London as a result of too much light pollution. Then I realised that I get to create the star-filled sky or the sheep-filled  meadow. Doh!!

Anyway, to come back to the counting of sheep, I always get one or two in my long line of sheep that balk at jumping the fence and have to go back and do it again.  This holds up the smooth progress of the line. Then I stopped and realised that nowhere have I read that the sheep  need to jump a fence.  Maybe they just need to be strolling past in a long line and be counted as they pass me.  New concept.  So I tried that but I kept getting confused and counted some of the sheep twice.  This disturbed me since I wanted my counting to be accurate.  Please don't ask me why.  It just needed to be right.

Well, I carried on counting and the next thing I knew it was 7 am and time to get up.  I had finally managed to let go of the need to be awake and lull myself into sleep. I love the feeling of falling asleep.  I really revel in the pleasurable sensations of my body allowing the day to drift away and relaxing more and more.  I never have that pleasurable feeling of slowly coming to consciousness in the mornings.  I forget to stretch and re-inhabit my body before I jump out of bed and start the day. Maybe as I count sheep next time I will add an image of sheep stretching and slowly coming awake so I can remember to do this in the morning.

This morning I am thinking about what my day will look like. Where to go, what to do?  The ideas for a project that I had the other day are still baking in my mental oven.  Nothing has emerged yet, but I await the arrival of inspiration. I want to put my blog entries into book form. Not for reading by the general public.  Why would anyone want to do that, but for myself, so I can see a year's worth of entries in one big, fat, colourful volume.  In December I will have been writing this for one year.  For me this feels like quite an accomplishment.

Before the winter sets in my intention is to read through my blog from the beginning.  I want to see if there is any pattern to my life. I'd like to monitor my mood swings,my health and maybe even weight! for the past year. I don't know if I will discover anything useful, but maybe I can read my own story a bit more objectively than the way I live it.  Maybe I can begin to see my changing emotional states as just a line of sheep that can be counted as they go past, but no one sheep is more important than another.  That would interesting.  I could start a new insomnia cure - counting Cynthia's many moods.