epiphany/duh
I grew up in Kentucky, and we didn't have air conditioning in the house. Except on the hottest days in summer - highs above 100 - I never missed it, and even then, I slept with a blanket at night even in August. When I went to church in the summer, I brought a jacket. In high school, they kept the place so cold that I wore my puffy winter coat in class all year. I mean, yeah, they kept it chillier than they needed to, but not that cold. Senior year, my first boyfriend bought me one of those reusable hand-warmers where you flex the metal disc inside the plastic packet to start an exothermic chemical reaction - supersaturated sodium acetate, I think - and then when you get home you boil it for 5 minutes to dissolve the crystals and use it again the next day. It was the most incredibly thoughtful gift he could have given me.
Of course when I moved to Boston, I was always freezing. I didn't spend much time in the dorm lounge in the summer because it was air-conditioned. I wore sweaters at night even in August. I had sock liners and glove liners for winter, with metallic strands woven in, although that was probably mainly for illusion; it was probably just a matter of having two layers that kept my fingers and toes warm. Or at least less frozen; they still ached with cold all the time.
Now, 23 years after the move, I'm usually too warm. It amazes people when they find out I grew up in Kentucky and now I love winter. I always tell them that I used to freeze even in the South, that I froze up here for 10 years, and then it was like a switch flipped, and I acclimated, and now I wilt if it's over 80 degrees. I'm a New Englander now, hardier than half the people born and raised here.
I had an epiphany the other evening. I didn't get home until really late last night, and I was freezing on the train. I'm never cold on the train, but I pulled my arms inside my tee shirt sleeves and crossed them over my chest. I had to get up after 3 hours' sleep to clean at the cat shelter, and even bustling around scooping poop and changing bedding, I didn't mind that the windows were open and the A/C off. There's nothing surprising in this; I think most everyone gets cold when they are sleep-deprived; it's the way the human body generally works, trying to coerce you into lying down and resting.
Then on the train ride in, still without enough sleep and still cold, I had the "duh!" moment. I moved to Massachusetts in 1990; 10 years later was 2000. That was the year I started taking risperidone; it's an antipsychotic, but I take it at a lower dose, for PTSD. I take it an hour before bed, and it doesn't make me drowsy, doesn't suck me down into not-quite-unconsciousness the way sleep meds and sedatives do. What it does is slow down the incessant windmill in my brain.
Before I started taking it, it took me two to three hours to fall asleep. At least. I would start to doze, and then at the edge of sleep, I would jerk back awake - not just to drowsy consciousness, but completely alert, heart pounding, adrenaline surging, sensing a presence. Over and over. Every night. Except for the nights where I would drift sideways, not into sleep, but into something I still don't have a name for.
I could watch myself dreaming, or at least acting like I was dreaming: I moved, my feet apparently walking, my hands either pushing against or reaching toward something or someone who wasn't there. But I had no idea who was in the dream with me; I couldn't read my own mind. When other people were with me as I slept, they would talk to me, and sometimes my mouth would talk back, but I had no idea why it was saying the words it was saying, or who it thought it was saying them to. It was shameful, because if I was aware of myself doing it, then I must be doing it on purpose, I must be trying to get attention, a drama queen, which in my family was one of the worst sins. But if I tried to stop "acting," it was worse: I was gone completely, and by the accounts to those co-sleepers, I was still talking, running, hitting sometimes.
The nights where I watched myself "dream," I don't know how long that lasted: an hour, perhaps, maybe more. Then I guess I would finally fall into actual sleep. If I was lucky, I didn't remember the actual dreams. The dreams I had weren't "real" flashbacks, because they weren't of actual events, which I could recall dispassionately; I dreamt of fires, and drowning, and nuclear holocausts, especially nuclear holocausts, knowing I'd gotten a deadly dose of radiation, that soon I would be horribly ill and wish I could die, but would be without the strength to do anything about it, and I knew I should kill myself while I could still do it painlessly, but I couldn't make myself do it, and I desperately searched through the wasteland of blowing yellow-orange sand looking for someone who was still alive and willing to kill me. Sometimes I would awaken early in the search, but most nights I was, I guess, too tired to wake up, and I would walk and walk, knowing the clock was ticking and the hideous sickness was drawing closer. When I finally did awaken, I was mentally exhausted already, and the panicked, searching dread stayed with me throughout the day, a sense of urgency without a goal.
So some nights I just didn't go to sleep. I didn't feel any more drained the next day if I just stayed up and wrote or sewed or played solitaire until it was time to go to class or to work. And at least the tiredness dampened the restless, purposeless urgency. So I got into an irregular pattern, in which I'd often stay up all night one night and sleep 12 hours the next. That's an average of six hours - well, 5.5, because there was still the hour it took to fall asleep even after an all-nighter, but if I was taking two to three hours to fall asleep each night otherwise, and then actually sleeping for only five or six hours anyway before a dream woke me, then this was much more efficient, right?
In 2000, I started taking the risperidone. The first night, I lay in bed with the usual anxiety - knowing I was about to go through the two-hour ordeal of spinning and jerking awake and then dreams or worse - plus the added anxiety of knowing I'd just ingested a mind-altering substance and didn't know what it would do to me. I drifted down, not into sleep, but also not into the abyss and fallingness. I just lay, my mind wafting, but not spinning. It was comfortable. I thought at some point, well, this is better; I wonder when the falling will start. And then it was light, and I realized after about three minutes' confusion that it was morning. I'd had an odd dream about being in a cow pasture, and I was looking for something, but it wasn't a nightmare, and I hadn't even been confused in the dream, let alone scared.
About a week later, I got up to get the paper and the front door was unlocked. I hadn't checked the night before to make sure it was locked. I thought back: I didn't remember checking the lock for several days. And I hadn't checked my closet before bed, or checked under the desk. There was simply no one to look for anymore. When I woke up at night and went to the bathroom, I just walked there in the dark. I didn't turn on the bedroom light and open the door and walk two quick steps to turn on the hall light and walk to the bathroom and turn on that light and then carefully avoid looking in the mirror while I washed my hands because someone might be standing behind me in the reflection. I just got up and took a leak and washed my hands and went back to bed. I'd been doing it for a week without even thinking about the change.
And if my math is right, that was about the time I stopped being cold all the time. When I started sleeping for nine hours a night on average. Instead of six, or five, or less. Thirteen years later, I have finally put two and two together.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/68674.html. Feel free to comment there
comments
Of course when I moved to Boston, I was always freezing. I didn't spend much time in the dorm lounge in the summer because it was air-conditioned. I wore sweaters at night even in August. I had sock liners and glove liners for winter, with metallic strands woven in, although that was probably mainly for illusion; it was probably just a matter of having two layers that kept my fingers and toes warm. Or at least less frozen; they still ached with cold all the time.
Now, 23 years after the move, I'm usually too warm. It amazes people when they find out I grew up in Kentucky and now I love winter. I always tell them that I used to freeze even in the South, that I froze up here for 10 years, and then it was like a switch flipped, and I acclimated, and now I wilt if it's over 80 degrees. I'm a New Englander now, hardier than half the people born and raised here.
I had an epiphany the other evening. I didn't get home until really late last night, and I was freezing on the train. I'm never cold on the train, but I pulled my arms inside my tee shirt sleeves and crossed them over my chest. I had to get up after 3 hours' sleep to clean at the cat shelter, and even bustling around scooping poop and changing bedding, I didn't mind that the windows were open and the A/C off. There's nothing surprising in this; I think most everyone gets cold when they are sleep-deprived; it's the way the human body generally works, trying to coerce you into lying down and resting.
Then on the train ride in, still without enough sleep and still cold, I had the "duh!" moment. I moved to Massachusetts in 1990; 10 years later was 2000. That was the year I started taking risperidone; it's an antipsychotic, but I take it at a lower dose, for PTSD. I take it an hour before bed, and it doesn't make me drowsy, doesn't suck me down into not-quite-unconsciousness the way sleep meds and sedatives do. What it does is slow down the incessant windmill in my brain.
Before I started taking it, it took me two to three hours to fall asleep. At least. I would start to doze, and then at the edge of sleep, I would jerk back awake - not just to drowsy consciousness, but completely alert, heart pounding, adrenaline surging, sensing a presence. Over and over. Every night. Except for the nights where I would drift sideways, not into sleep, but into something I still don't have a name for.
I could watch myself dreaming, or at least acting like I was dreaming: I moved, my feet apparently walking, my hands either pushing against or reaching toward something or someone who wasn't there. But I had no idea who was in the dream with me; I couldn't read my own mind. When other people were with me as I slept, they would talk to me, and sometimes my mouth would talk back, but I had no idea why it was saying the words it was saying, or who it thought it was saying them to. It was shameful, because if I was aware of myself doing it, then I must be doing it on purpose, I must be trying to get attention, a drama queen, which in my family was one of the worst sins. But if I tried to stop "acting," it was worse: I was gone completely, and by the accounts to those co-sleepers, I was still talking, running, hitting sometimes.
The nights where I watched myself "dream," I don't know how long that lasted: an hour, perhaps, maybe more. Then I guess I would finally fall into actual sleep. If I was lucky, I didn't remember the actual dreams. The dreams I had weren't "real" flashbacks, because they weren't of actual events, which I could recall dispassionately; I dreamt of fires, and drowning, and nuclear holocausts, especially nuclear holocausts, knowing I'd gotten a deadly dose of radiation, that soon I would be horribly ill and wish I could die, but would be without the strength to do anything about it, and I knew I should kill myself while I could still do it painlessly, but I couldn't make myself do it, and I desperately searched through the wasteland of blowing yellow-orange sand looking for someone who was still alive and willing to kill me. Sometimes I would awaken early in the search, but most nights I was, I guess, too tired to wake up, and I would walk and walk, knowing the clock was ticking and the hideous sickness was drawing closer. When I finally did awaken, I was mentally exhausted already, and the panicked, searching dread stayed with me throughout the day, a sense of urgency without a goal.
So some nights I just didn't go to sleep. I didn't feel any more drained the next day if I just stayed up and wrote or sewed or played solitaire until it was time to go to class or to work. And at least the tiredness dampened the restless, purposeless urgency. So I got into an irregular pattern, in which I'd often stay up all night one night and sleep 12 hours the next. That's an average of six hours - well, 5.5, because there was still the hour it took to fall asleep even after an all-nighter, but if I was taking two to three hours to fall asleep each night otherwise, and then actually sleeping for only five or six hours anyway before a dream woke me, then this was much more efficient, right?
In 2000, I started taking the risperidone. The first night, I lay in bed with the usual anxiety - knowing I was about to go through the two-hour ordeal of spinning and jerking awake and then dreams or worse - plus the added anxiety of knowing I'd just ingested a mind-altering substance and didn't know what it would do to me. I drifted down, not into sleep, but also not into the abyss and fallingness. I just lay, my mind wafting, but not spinning. It was comfortable. I thought at some point, well, this is better; I wonder when the falling will start. And then it was light, and I realized after about three minutes' confusion that it was morning. I'd had an odd dream about being in a cow pasture, and I was looking for something, but it wasn't a nightmare, and I hadn't even been confused in the dream, let alone scared.
About a week later, I got up to get the paper and the front door was unlocked. I hadn't checked the night before to make sure it was locked. I thought back: I didn't remember checking the lock for several days. And I hadn't checked my closet before bed, or checked under the desk. There was simply no one to look for anymore. When I woke up at night and went to the bathroom, I just walked there in the dark. I didn't turn on the bedroom light and open the door and walk two quick steps to turn on the hall light and walk to the bathroom and turn on that light and then carefully avoid looking in the mirror while I washed my hands because someone might be standing behind me in the reflection. I just got up and took a leak and washed my hands and went back to bed. I'd been doing it for a week without even thinking about the change.
And if my math is right, that was about the time I stopped being cold all the time. When I started sleeping for nine hours a night on average. Instead of six, or five, or less. Thirteen years later, I have finally put two and two together.
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/68674.html. Feel free to comment there
comments