Let me sleep, and dream of sheep

A line from "And Dream of Sheep" by Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love" album 1985

Well, it’s silly o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept all night. Another one of these stupid phases I go through. I tell you, sometimes I can sleep 10 or more hours a night and have a nap in the day as well, and other times I can’t sleep for toffee. When you can’t sleep you become obsessed with it. As soon as you wake up you want to know what time it is and how long you have slept for. The tiredness drives you insane. I swear I could murder sometimes just through lack of sleep. And that’s another thing: why am I having trouble sleeping when I’m already run down and exhausted anyway? I’m really not very happy about that.

Back to the murder thing though. Last night I couldn’t sleep either. Mr Man was tossing and turning, bouncing the bed around and huffing and puffing, and moaned “I can’t sleep”. It made me laugh when I saw this happen in a comedy sketch recently. Not so funny when you're lying next to it. Finally he got up for a cup of tea. Of course he had to bring it back to bed with him – which means the light has to go on until his tea has reached the optimum temperature for drinking. “Finally, I’m going to get some sleep” I thought, once the light went out.

It was only a few hours before my alarm went off for Mr Mans medication. I nudged him and then rolled over to go back to sleep. Unfortunately though we have the creakiest floor boards in our bathroom in the whole world. So, awake again I thought “While I’m awake I might as well use the loo, and then I can go back to bed and have a nice long sleep”. How wrong was I? I got back into bed and that was it – I was wide awake.

I decided to get up for a while and catch up on some blog reading instead of lying there looking at our ceiling. It’s quite a nice ceiling though. Mr Man painted stars on it in the shape of some constellations with some paint that glows in the dark. Very romantic. Still, not much to look at in day light. You can barely make out the greenish yellow dots in the day time.

By about lunch time I thought maybe I could manage to have an afternoon nap. It still took me ages to drop off to sleep, and then…

the phone rang.

It’s a friend of mine. “Sorry, were you asleep?” “Yes, it’s ok though, don’t worry”. Where did that come from? Of course it’s not ok. I was asleep, and now I’m awake again, how is that ok? She apologised and said goodbye so that I could go back to sleep. That was the theory anyway. I lay there for a while, struggling to get comfortable, and then just as I could feel myself drifting…

the door knocked.

It was nothing of great importance; just a leaflet. I say that as if there could possibly be anything “of great importance” worthy of disturbing my sleep.

By this time I want to put a very large notice on the door saying “GET LOST” for anyone foolish enough to want to knock on my door again; and unplug the phone, switch off the mobile and go back to sleep.

Sleep. Is that too much to ask for?

Now here I am again, and this is where the murder comes in. I have Mr Mans axe here; as you know, all Schizophrenics own an axe in case they decide that they want to run around chopping peoples heads off one day. So if you see the headline "Wife of a Schizophrenic Kills Postman with Axe" that will be me.