Sleep.

I feel tired today.

Sleep.

People take it for granted but to me it is one of the most precious things on this planet.

I have always had a very tumultuous relationship with sleep. Even when I was small, I struggled to sleep well.  Night times had the prepensity to bring a mixture of nightmares or just hours of my imagination roaming in the darkness.  Nightmares as a child, or the inability to switch off my active mind left me with general irregular sleeping patterns.  I became fussy, requiring optimum conditions of temperature, light, quietness in order to actually settle enough to fall asleep.

As I entered secondary school, came the anxiety of not getting enough sleep to concentrate on my lessons the following day and so the fear of not sleeping became the problem itself as it fuelled my difficult sleeping patterns.  It was at secondary school I experienced my first bout of depression and anxiety which obviously meant inability to sleep as well as general lethargia and a fatigue that I just could not quench.  

Through college and university, the trials of growing up, studies, relationships weighed on my mind at night coupled with the student lifestyle and diet of countless nights out, alcohol and takeaways. My mental health issues of my teens were also never far away impacting my sleep patterns further.  It was just after graduating university however that I experienced my first proper taste of night terrors. 

The Terrors consisted of periods of paralysis where I felt fully conscious, able to see my surroundings and move my eyes but unable to move the rest of my body.  I could sometimes hear voices shouting at me above my head, or hear screaming but I was unable to move or roll over to "wake" out of it.  During these moments, I was unsure of where reality ended and a dream state began.  Although I could see, and the room around me was visible, there were also times where there appeared to be a screen lifted from my sight, as if my eyes were opening. It's difficult to describe just how frightening these times were.

Following the terrors, was my first episode of Insomnia.

It wasn't just little sleep or disturbed sleep or patchy sleep.  It was no sleep.  It lasted three weeks.  In that time I tried over-the-counter remedies which did nothing.  I finally went to the doctors and was given temazepam. 

This was my saviour at a time of exhaustion and desperation.  Although there is no physical pain to Insomnia, it's a gradual, slow erosion of you from the inside.  You have no energy.  Mornings I would be in tears, just knowing I'd clocked another 8 hours of full consciousness.  I was tired, miserable, and I feared my depression was literally looming round every corner.  I felt like a shadow of myself and on the verge of a breakdown. Temazepam literally saved me from this by providing me my first night of actual sleep in weeks.  I can not describe how this felt.  Literally can not put it into words.  

I'm glad to say that I've not experienced that level of Insomnia again.  I still have difficulty sleeping.  Anything that stops me sleeping now feels like a personal attack.  Noise, lights, ticking clocks and snoring all become my enemy depriving me of this precious resource, like oxygen.  If you're lucky enough to be able to sleep well, or one of these wierdo's who doesn't even have to think about falling a sleep- I hope you realise you have an invaluable commodity. Since sleep deprivation is used as a weapon; a recognised torture method I also hope you think twice if you snore.  Persistent snoring should be punishable by death as far as I'm concerned. 

Sleep tight.