Balancing Act, 19

One of the hardest things to balance is sleep. It appears that fewer and fewer people can claim regular, restful and restorative sleep as one of the things they have to be grateful for. I am one of those poor wretches. One more time I woke up after four hours of sleep, then dozed for an hour, then tried to doze for another hour and a half and here I am, up, showered, dressed, preparing breakfast and waiting to go down for a nap. It is very difficult to do my kind of job on poor sleep. I am in a caring and supportive role with vulnerable adults, and no one needs to see me in a compromised state. I have become rather a good actor, not in terms of faking care and compassion, because those things cannot be feigned. People are way more astute than that. But I do have to fake being alert, not wanting to nod off to sleep in the middle of a client's distressed personal monologue, and to really control my emotions and anger if there is anything in the work day that is going to trigger me. I think of this as a kind of competition (with myself that is, and generally I get through these difficult days okay. And fortunately, I still sleep fairly well maybe five nights out of seven. There are many likely causes to my sleep difficulty. I used to think of it as trauma, but I'm no longer convinced. I first realized that I was a light sleeper when I was eighteen, and already knew that I could get by nicely on just six or six and a half hours of sleep every night. I was living at the time in a very difficult situation with my mother and her violent drunken boyfriend, and perhaps my sleep was suffering a bit around him. Even during my unstable summer that followed as I struck out on my own in Vancouver, my sleep usually did not suffer. I found my own apartment, a full time job, and continued to sleep well. For years, I would get by on six to eight hours a night. I was living in a succession of difficult situations, at times life-threatening. Then, when I was forty, it all began to change. I think I was already getting hit by trauma. I was kept awake by marathon toothaches, and then there was the succession of elephants living upstairs from me, followed by many other stresses from many other hominids of varying states of evolution, or lack thereof. Around that time in my life some real trauma was hitting, as well as the legacy of many years of garbage-bagged emotion and grief from the deaths of hundreds of people, chiefly the death of my mother. I would often be lying awake into the next day, lucky if I had been able to successfully keep my eyes closed longer than thirty minutes. I became homeless, couch-surfing between my father who hated me, except for such displays of filial obligation, and with various friends of dubious sincerity (I'm no longer in touch with any of those losers, so that will give you a clue). after I landed in some form of housing or other, it has since remained difficult for me to stay asleep. Spending a year working nights in an unsafe homeless shelter in 2003 didn't help either. I have come to realize that this is probably never going to change for me. I do sleep a little bit better, but on top of everything else now, I have these very strange and intense dreams. No, they are not nightmares because they are not frightening, and I actually look forward to revisiting those places of sleep. But while I was going through some of my dream journals from the last twenty-four years or so, I found one rather interesting nugget. I will share it with you in full: "Mon 20 March 95 I was in a room full of people-about forty. They were all friends with a protective benevolent interest in me. I asked one of them where he was from. He replied that he was dead, that they were all dead and living in the unseen. Then I realized that these were all my friends in the unseen and my heart rejoiced. Then I met a Christian family in a rural area. They invited me into their home and offered to pray over me together including their teenage son and daughter." I actually believe that this is really happening in my dreams, Gentle Reader, as none of the Jungian methods of dream-interpretation to which I am accustomed can offer me a single clue as to what has been happening. As far as getting enough sleep is concerned, I simply get up after six hours in bed, as I did this very early morning, then following breakfast, go down for a nap of a couple of hours, as I have also just done. It was rather an interesting dream. I was in a borrowed apartment somewhere in Colombia or Costa Rica, I think, preparing to return to my place here in Vancouver. And later on trying to avoid the second-hand smoke of a funny-looking little guy in a baggy cheap suit who was chomping on a cigar. Hey, I didn't say there isn't room for humour!