Lost in Thought

 

There’s a meme about calculating how much sleep you would get if you could fall asleep right now.

Most people connect to that one. For many in our mostly-electronic world, sleep can sometimes be elusive.

One of the most annoying instances of insomnia is when you feel like you can’t keep your eyes open long enough to see the end of a program you’re watching, but you persist, perhaps giving your head an occasional shake, or changing your sitting position so your eyes won’t close. Then, when the show is over, you trudge to bed and pull up the covers only to discover you can’t sleep.

This has happened to me.

Just as sleep comes creeping, I get an idea for a story I’m writing. Sometimes it’s a particularly good line that I don’t want to forget. Of course, I never have pen and paper by my bedside when this happens. So, I try to fix it in my mind.

Two hours later, I finally fall asleep, and the next morning either the line I was trying to save is gone, or it doesn’t sound as literary as it did the night before.

Sometimes, it’s an entire scene. Little bits and pieces keep coming in as I try to fix the order of what I want to write. Of course, I don’t get up to write them because my body is too tired. But the mind just won’t shut up.

One night I finally did what the experts suggest. After trying for about an hour to chase the ideas away without success, I got up, went to another room, and in lighting just slightly less dim than candles, I wrote what I thought was a great next blog. 

It took about an hour and a half. It didn’t really help that much, as other thoughts took the place of the ones in the blog when I returned to bed. But I was not going to give in to any more thoughts keeping me awake while I got up to write them.

I finally fell asleep sometime after 4 a.m.

In the morning, I read my blog. No, this would have to be put aside, never to be published as a blog. It would have caused my friends and readers to ask, “Do you keep track of every mean thing anyone has ever done to you, or are you making this up in order to throw a pity party?”

Indeed, I think my thoughts turn darker in the wee small hours of the night. That blog will never see the light of day.

Sometimes it isn’t a story line. As I relax, a thought comes unbidden. Perhaps earlier I’d seen a commercial for a movie I want to see, and I’m suddenly enveloped in the memory of wanting to see Mary Poppins when I was eight. My “best friend” was going to see it, and was allowed to invite one friend to go with her. Naturally, she asked someone else.

I was crushed, and didn’t end up getting to see that film – on TV – until I was an adult. My parents weren’t about to send me off to the movie theatre alone, and no one else in my family was interested in seeing it.

I also don’t have “best friends” anymore, although I do go to the movies by myself if there’s something I want to see that no one in my circle is interested in.

The self-satisfaction of my own personal growth from that incident should be enough to allow me to sleep.

But no.

Often, one thought leads to another until a cascade of slights and sorrows from my childhood and teenage years keeps me tossing and turning for hours.

I’ve often been told, especially by those of a psychological bent, to just let those thoughts go.

“How?” I ask.

They stare at me as if I’d just dropped onto the planet. But they never answer that question.

I don’t know what sort of junk is in the attic of my brain waiting for a nudge to fall out of its cobwebs and plague me.

I do know there is good stuff, too. I’ve used scenes from my life in my stories.

When I say things like that, there are those who indignantly say, “I don’t want to be a character in one of your novels!”

Oh, trust me, honey, you won’t be!

Generally, people who make those statements aren’t anywhere near interesting enough for an appearance. I will use a line they’ve said or the essence of what they’ve said, but it will come from someone else. Sometimes a scene, a mannerism or a behavior is borrowed without any necessity of recreating the original person. It wouldn’t be creative writing otherwise.

Writers are, after all, observers of the human condition.

Lest you think I spend my nights plagued by the devils of memory prodding me with pitchforks of sleeplessness and desolation, rest assured I spend most nights blissfully unaware of my memories, good bad or indifferent.

And if I fall asleep right now, I’ll get 7¾ hours of sleep before my dog wakes me.