"are you awake, or do you dream...?"*

I finally want to write a little about my struggle with sleepiness. It's misunderstood by so many I need to write down what it's really like to live in this netherworld.

I can sleep for Britain, Europe, the whole planet. It's not fun. At 10.30 every night a little alarm goes off in my head and I have to sleep. Resistance means pain and a worse day tomorrow. I'll go to bed and within minutes my eyes will close. I'll try to read, I need to read something just to move out of "busy head mode" which means weirder dreams. Because I will certainly dream. I'll travel to countries I've never visited before. I'll have adventures with friends I've not seen for a while or not yet met. I'll be a character in a Sci-fi film not yet written or a series I like. Very quickly I'll wake up but go back to sleep. Just a scene change really. If I'm really unlucky before I sleep I'll hallucinate. This means that my mind has begun to dream before I've really fallen asleep. It's not a mental illness just my dreams taking on full colour, scratch 'n' sniff, surround sound with really loud speakers. It's the reason that I flick the TV over on adverts. "118 men" and "go compare opera singers" floating around at 11pm would give the world a panic.

So after a restless night of frequent waking but almost immediate sleeping I'll wake up every 10 minutes until my alarm goes off. If I have to work, that's 7am and it's agony. I feel like I haven't slept for months. A shower and at least two mugs of coffee later and my brain is screaming at me to sleep again. A walk down the hill, fresh air only helps while I'm doing it. A burst of grumpy related adrenaline lasts longer but doesn't make for great work relationships. You try walking into the office muttering under your breath about lousy parking. It's that or drop my head on the desk and fall asleep. I can't win. The adrenaline makes my veins buzz though and as it wears off the urge to sleep turns again into a physical pain, like my veins are filled with electric current, or as I've said to friends "like my veins are wired to the mains." At some (maybe several) point(s) during the day my head will fall on my desk. I will slur my words when the phone rings. I can't help it. The walk home is excrutiating. Tiredness sets off a blood sugar dip and I sometimes find it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. At home I will fall asleep on the sofa. On occasion the room will fade around me and reshape into something else. Another hallucination. Only part of my brain is sleeping. Housework gets put off and put off.

If I stay home I will at the very least by 11am be unable to function. No adrenaline (just coffee) means that I can't stay awake. So I'll doze. If I'm lucky I'll wake up during the afternoon and force myself to go into town, do some housework, shopping or whatever I can manage, but if I go out then I do the absolute minimum. I'll be uncoordinated and sleepy the whole way. I'll then doze again until about 4.30. I can usually manage to spend some time on the internet in the evening but friends in chat rooms (I can only really manage friends that I can switch off when I must, being out and about is so draining) laugh when I say I have to go at 9 or 10 from chat rooms. It's early for them. For me it's not, my head is spinning and 10.30 approaches.

So this is a description of how the hours of the day affect me. It doesn't really explain how at any time, whatever I'm doing, however much I slept, I'm exhausted. I can fall asleep anywhere. I once fell asleep in a noisy pub with my head resting against the speaker. I once tried to walk through a well marked glass door because part of my brain knew it was there but it wasn't the part controlling the forward momentum. I fall frequently, sprain ankles and look very silly at work when my brain takes a second off and doesn't realise that ground can be uneven. I look so stupid and people around me aren't always sympathetic, when they are it's often worse. It's undignified and humiliating. Tiredness means that you can't form words, you look and sound drunk. In fact on the various things I've just mentioned that's exactly what people assume. I drop things. My brain forgets that it's holding a magazine, drink, keys or whatever and releases its grip.

My brain. That's the culprit. It's not me, it's my brain. And by the way. I'm not depressed.

* from Alphaville - Dream Machine