Wednesday 24 February 2021

 Sleepy News

I read the other day that a university in some part of the United States has been researching the effects of insomnia on fruit flies. Me neither and I couldn't agree more. 

I read this because the words sleep and insomnia caught my attention. I don't own up to being an insomniac. I'm what you'd call an irregular sleeper. In my wild youth, I could I could sleep for oh around 10 hours or more. Then marriage and children changed that a bit. And now, when I live on my own and could sleep for 20 hours without someone saying as much as "fruit fly", I can't. 

I try to do all those things that are recommended.  I don't have my mobile in my bedroom (unless I need to set the alarm for any reason - no reason since lockdown), I do not have a television set in the room. I read for around half an hour, usually a crime novel. Then I switch off the light, turn on BBC's Radio 4 or RTE's Radio 1 and try to drift off to sleep. I wake around an hour and a half later and toss and turn for at least an hour. When there's a full moon, I usually can't drift off for longer than that, so I trot into the living room and scroll Twitter or read poetry for an hour or more. I go back to bed and finally doze off, waking at around 8.30 a.m.  I have learned to live with it, more or less. Tried taking a sleeping tablet but that didn't seem to do the trick. I guess I need less sleep, unlike the fruit flies.

In case you are dying of curiosity, the university doing the research discovered that when deprived of sleep, fruit flies crashed into walls, totally disoriented. Maybe I should look at those sleeping tablets again....


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