Sweet Dreams?

As a child I didn't suffer from nightmares or bad dreams. My older sister did. sometimes she would float through my room like a wraith on her way to snuggle up to my parents, looking pale and teary. Sometimes I was jealous, I wanted an excuse to go snuggle up some nights when I was awake. So I would cry a few crocodile tears and go pretend I had had a nightmare on the nights I awoke in the middle and felt lonely.....

My folks house is like a circle with two staircases, each room reached from the previous, mostly. My folks room was up a fork in the staircase and my room lay at the top of the other fork. My Mum used to tell a tale of one night she came to bed and poked her head through my door on her way up. She was rather bemused to find my upper body dangling from my bed, leaving me upside down and batlike, grinning at her....

Sleep was not an issue for me as a child. i needed as much sleep as my Father and was all set to have high energy levels and a healthy sleep life. That all changed with glandular fever followed by chronic fatigue syndrome.

I remember the discussion with my parents. It's Ok to wake up really early, but if you do, could you stay in your room and quietly look at books or something? They bought me a blind to try and help me stay asleep when the bright light flowed in through my big high up dormer window.

I had a little window on the other side of my room. A tiny one, under the eaves. Light filtered green through the huge willow outside. Tendrils of clematis creeping through to say hello. In Summer the little window was always open.

Bedtime would see my Mum come and join me with a book or a story of the purple hippo that lived in the big drain up the road and who ate rosehips. Our house was often cold away from the heat of the fire in Winter so we would snuggle in bed together and share my toasty stone hotwater bottle as we took it in turns to read.

I would often have too much buzz to sleep and I perfected a technique for sleeping. One time my Mum asked me how I got to sleep, I described it and she said it sounded like a form of meditation. I think she was right. I focus on a part of my body real hard, focus on relaxing it until it tingles. I slowly move the tingle up my legs from my toes and then I work on my fingers up my arm. I never managed to get any of the rest of my body to tingle.....

In my teens, when the lurgey hit, it was a bad time for me. My doctor placed me on anti-depressants as well. I think there was much more going on with me than a physical illness. I think I lost something important at that time, all my joie de vivre fled and I have never truly regained it. That little kid who had so much energy and joy was gone.

Anyway I wasn't going to talk about all that but....

You see, I have nightmares these days. Not regularly, not that common, just occasional. I had one last night.

I was driving somewhere, in convoy with friends. Something happened and the car behind me ended up crashing and going up in flames along with it's two occupants. I knew them but I do not know who they were. I didn't see them.

Not so easy to get to sleep after that. So the day started badly with me feeling icky and it just never got better. I had no energy today to deal with my Boss or the LP. Sleep seems like a blessed escape from my life. What happened to the me, for whom sleep was a necessity,an intrusion, a small part of my life with no issues attached?