Insomnia

I haven't been sleeping well. It hasn't been the best start to the year. Actually, to articulate it properly, it's been a shit start to the year. I don't think that's to blame though. Maybe partly.

I don't usually have a problem with sleep. Sleep is a good, good friend to me. One of my oldest friends, in fact. I hit the sack, lights out. Straight out. I can eat a tonne before I climb into bed, I can drink coffee late at night, I can exercise and get to sleep easily. I sleep well before big days, interviews, etcetera... So not much idea why sleep has rolled over and turned her back to me.

It's not such a problem really, it's just the getting to sleep. Usually that's my forte. I don't even have time to register pillow:cheek before everything sinks away, usually. Lately I can't. I get to the very brink of sleep and something pulls me back, gently and not altogether unpleasantly, were it not for the fact that I know I'll be tossing and turning before I do finally get to sleep. It's not like I need too much sleep for my current day-to-day, so it's not a bother, more a weird inconvenience.

Coincidentally, I've been researching folk remedies and naturopathic treatment for insomnia at work. Onions work, apparently. Cut up some onion, stuff it in a glass and breathe deeply from the glass before you go to bed. Who would have thought. Grass too- take a walk barefoot on grass before you go to bed. People swear by this. Long-term insomniacs- not like me.

When I did finally get to sleep last night, I dreamt I was riding a London bus on the top deck. Then the flooring disappeared, along with the chassis and the driver and the other passengers- pretty much the entire bus- and I was a long, long way up, kind of floating along the path the absent-bus was taking. Lots of people below milling around like there was a carnival going on. No vertiginous complaints, no fear, no idea where I was going. All I could think of was How on earth am I going to reach all the way down to push the button for my stop (wherever it is).