Sleepin' Hard

Some nights exhaustion sets in and I hit the sheets early, like last night. I lay my head on the pillow around 9:30 pm. Before I had time to settle in, I was asleep, my jaw clenched, my fists in tight balls, my body weighing the mattress down in a sagging wad.

After what seemed a long time, I found myself struggling to escape from dreams that seemed very real, as if I were an actor in a play that was based on my own realities. I was convinced it was early morning, but when I looked at the clock, I had only slept for about an hour. My body felt as if it had done a full eight hours of repair work and growth.

I was sweaty and thirsty and confused, rousing myself to go to the bathroom to flood my face with cool water. I downed an entire glass of water, shook out the crumpled sheets and curled up again, rationalizing that I could now settle down for a normal night's sleep.

But no. Again and again I worked through the hard labor of sleep that repairs the body and drains the inner resources, waking to splash my face and recharge, letting the brain waves resume some sort of normal thought pattern and take a deep breath to reassure myself that I was still in my bedroom, that I was OK, that it was still night, and that I had only been "asleep" a short while.

This is the third or fourth time I have experienced this kind of recovery work. I take it as a good sign that I am decompressing from all the toxicity and pressure of cancer. By my usual waking time of early morning I was finally able to fall into some sort of normal sleep and I eventually woke refreshed and restored from the hard work of such sleep.

I'm sure a sleep specialist could tell me the in's and out's of this type of experience. I am just glad it doesn't happen too often!