So, I’ve been listening to this audiobook the past two days, quite a nice voice reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, of Edgar A. Poe. (At first, my attention was drawn by the title. If you are a writer you know how much do we struggle with titles, and such. This guy just said ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna call it like the character the POV of this novel is written in. So there is no doubt at all who the main character is. Yes. I’m Harry Pottering, before Harry Potter’. At the end, things worked out well).
Well, the character, on the first few chapters (spoilers ahead… I guess), decides to go on an adventure, and arranges with his dearest friend, August, to hide in the ship cellar. At some moment of the story, he falls asleep. And sleeps for what he thinks, many days, years like, has the most horrible dreams and when he manages to wake up, he feels terribly dehydrated and numb.
So well, I have just taken a fifteen minutes nap and woke up feeling the exact same.
And this is the point where the Poe story ends and mine starts (not only because I don’t want to spoil you the entire story, but because the audiobook is six hours long and I haven’t even listened to half of it. So, YOU better not spoil me). My problem is that today alone I have taken four naps. I’m not kidding.
And I’m not taking them because I want to, I don’t have free time at all, but I’ve been falling asleep when working or writing. My boyfriend told me it could be the heat that makes you drowsy and tired, as your body wastes calories on not overheating. This week we had up to 40 Grades Celsius most of the days. But today it wasn’t nearly as hot. As a matter of fact, I drank the tea I couldn’t in the week in this past two days.
Yet I was writing a tweet and I fell asleep while at it. The result was the masterpiece of a dyslexic on an Enigma Machine.
I sleep for fifteen minutes around half past ten. I woke up at nine, and for some reason, my body started to shut off an hour and a half in. I wrote until almost twelve when I tried to take a ten-minute nap (I fell asleep again while writing) and it turned out to be a forty minutes nap. Hello 12:30, I didn’t want to see you on my clock at all. On which my mother called me on the phone. I walked across the room to hang up because I thought it was my alarm. I woke up, quite confused about how I got there.
I lay on my back and had some really weird dreams about faces getting close to me to see something really close, at four in the afternoon. And after polishing some details of a page, I fell asleep just now, at nine. For fifteen minutes.
I had already talked about my problems with sleeping. I don’t know what it is that either my body, or my mind, can’t arrange to stay fully awake (and, you know. Mentally shining brightly) for more than a few hours.
So, from someone that it’s not very sure about what to do… What would you advise me?
And, while we are at it if there are other weird sleepers in the crowd; would you raise your hand and tell me your stories? I would love to hear them!
Until I see you again, and please, don’t let the bedbugs bite, either dance over your sleeping body.
