Epistemographer

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with sleep…to put it simply, I just don’t get tired when normal people seem to. That’s not to say that I don’t every get sleepy; I do, it’s just that it happens when the sun comes up, rather than when the sun sets. It runs in my family, too…my Mom is worse than I, and her dad was just the same.

That’s not to say that I just toss and turn – one might say that I learned my limits early on in life, and embraced my nocturnal nature. As a child, I used to spend hours each night reading by flashlight, a practice which gave way somewhere in high school to the late radio broadcast of Larry King. In college, the one-two whammy of a heavy courseload and 2 am reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central meant that I was more likely to see 4 am than I was to see 9 am, and by the time I got to grad school, it was A&E’s 3 am episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and journal articles with which I whiled away the early morning hours. When I needed to be up early, I would take a sleeping aid of some kind (Sominex et al), which usually got the job done but left me feeling all sorts of groggy the next day.

Then, while doing a research on insomnia a few years ago, I discovered melatonin supplements. It was a revelation; I could take a pill and within a half-hour feel the easy sleepiness that everyone around me seemed to take for granted. I’ve never been formally tested, but it seems pretty clear that the supplements make up for the melatonin that my own body doesn’t seem to produce once the sun sets. For more than three years, melatonin has been a part of my nightly routine, and I’ve actually enjoyed a regular, dare I say “normal” sleeping schedule.

That is, unless something happens like tonight; I opened the medicine cabinet to find the bottle empty. “Crap,” I thought. It was too late to go to a drugstore, too late to replenish my supply. See, the odd thing is that melatonin doesn’t build up in your system, so if I don’t take it one night, it’s right back to my old tendencies. Thus, it’s close to 4 in the morning, and after spending several hours clearing my inbox, fiddling with blog templates and catching up on other work, I’m still uncomfortably wide awake.

I’ve got to admit, it’s an extremely familiar feeling, and one that I don’t miss in the least.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 at 3:50 am and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.