To sleep, perchance to sleep.

I’ve always had a weird relationship with sleep, but it’s been like a Barbenheimer on MDMA level weird since having covid last September.

As a kid, I remember being 10-ish and not sleeping/ keeping the rest of the house awake too (what a little punk) to the point that my mom took away my bedside digital clock because it didn’t matter what time it was, I just needed to rest instead of saying “it’s 11:00 and I’m not asleep! It’s 12:00 and I’m not asleep!”

As a teen, there was a night during one hot summer in 1995 where a North Delta neighbour had recently been dumped by his girlfriend and listened to Kiss from a Rose by Seal ALL NIGHT LONG on repeat and it was too hot to close the window so it was seared into my sweaty brain. This was the summer of the Batman Forever movie and soundtrack and let me tell you, I’ve hated that song ever since, at least until a Yellowjackets episode (that I’m convinced was written specifically for me) gave me a different and more enjoyable association with the song.

While going to Simon Fraser University, I had many espresso driven all nighters to write essays and somehow functioned fine the next day. Those sleepless nights were entirely my own fault, and because I was just a sweet young thing, apparently my body could take it.

In 2003, I travelled in South America for 4 months and I tend to suck at sleeping on vacation at the best of times but was also taking an anti malarial pill that caused insomnia and/or nightmares and OH BOY DID IT EVER. The lack of sleep almost certainly contributed to all the sickness I experienced during that four months, altitude sickness, food poisoning, infected bug bites, stinging nettle rashes that turned into massive hallucinatory allergic reactions, a touch of pneumonia.

As an adult, I still suck at sleeping to the point that I usually need my own bedroom or else there’s no hope in hell I’ll sleep at all. I’ve always been a person who has weird murder dreams but having covid last September brought the insomnia and dreams into David Cronenberg screenplay territory. Lately it’s been extra weird and so I was not surprised to learn about dysautonomnia recently from a nurse practitioner at the U of A long covid clinic. I thought that insomnia led to fatigue but turns out it could be the other way around, if my body is in fight or flight state basically all the time, even when I’m sleeping or trying to sleep. This makes so much sense to me that I almost celebrated a little when she mentioned it, and it also helps explain why no amount of melatonin, sleeping pills or cbd/thc oil will reliably help if my body decides it’s in emergency mode all night long.

I don’t want any medical advice (unless it involves actual magic that will let me sleep 8 hours a night for the next year) but will happily commiserate with my fellow shitty sleepers, and know that I am not alone in this.