I just can't get no sleep tonight

[venta]

If asked to list things I'm good at, I'd put "sleeping" really near the top of the list. I can sleep anywhere, through anything, at very short notice. I'm crap at getting up, but boy can I sleep.

On Friday night I went to bed at an unusually late 2am, after a pleasant evening with davefish, lanfykins and hendybear. From under my duvet I could hear Hendybear and Lanfykins talking and laughing in the next room... as I failed to go to sleep til nearly 5. I should add that they weren't keeping me awake - I'm used to sleeping through the sounds of voices (and I'd have gone and asked them to shut up if it was a problem).

However, since I had an early morning on Saturday, I got very little sleep. The two nights since then I've fallen into bed quite tired (late on Saturday after a hen-night, and early last night because I was knackered) and gone to sleep, only to wake up somewhere around 5am. This is not good, and it's not like me. And I don't like it.

So I'm rather short on sleep at the moment, and feeling very flaky at work. My ravel'd sleeve has not been knit up. However, I observer that a surprising number of people seem to be claiming lack of sleep at present. Is there some kind of plague of insomnia hitting the nation ?

[Poll #1167128]

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

The really annoying thing is not that I've been getting less sleep than usual but that the quality of my sleep seems to get worse the more sleep I have: if I get to bed sensibly early, I either lie awake till 3 a.m., or sleep apparently soundly (even sleeping through all the delivery lorries etc.) but eventually get dragged into wakefulness feeling as though I've been bashed all over with the giant mallet of tiredness; if I don't get to sleep till 1 a.m. I seem to be less horribly knackered when I get woken up at 6 a.m. by the delivery lorries.

I have heard theories about sleep happening in 4-hour cycles or something, and there being bad points to be woken at, so e.g. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is actually better than 6 (but worse than 8?), but the whole thing is all a bit superstition-and-folk-wisdom.