Last night, I went to bed at 2:00 A.M. I had finally gotten tired and was sure I would fall properly asleep within two hours and probably be drowsing in thirty minutes. (I know, I know, but that business of falling asleep in ten minutes? Never known it to happen. Ever. Being positive I would fall asleep within two hours is as good as it gets in terms of Attitude when going to bed.) I lay there thinking calm relaxing swirling thoughts and my muscles, all by themselves, got tenser and tenser and tenser and tenser and tenser and tenser and not one of 60 years worth of accumulated stuff-that-sometimes-works did me a lick of good this time. So I gave up around 3:30 because I was fully awake again. Tired, but fully awake. So I went into the study and read for awhile, gave the cats their breakfast around 5:30, came back to bed around 6 as my husband was half-waking. We snuggled and laid contingency plans about his breakfast - he was going in for his second Covid shot around 8 and picking up takeout breakfast on the way back, so this was a good morning for me to sleep through if it came to that. Normally I put his pills together and fix his breakfast when he's ready for it, sometime between 8:30 and 9:30, after he's tested his blood and had his insulin, unless I sleep through all that, which I sometimes do. The clock radio is on my side of the bed because he sleeps through it and I don't, so I turned it off when it went off around 7:00 and about the time he got up I was where I'd originally expected to be at 3:00 when I originally went to bed, so I put the apnea mask back on and by the time he left the house I was asleep enough not to hear him. I slept, I dreamed about rescuing small animals from large snowfalls, I woke a little after 10:00, gave myself some lying-in time to see if I'd go back to sleep, but I was too hungry for that, so I got up, showered, dressed, fixed brunch for me and lunch for my husband, read and washed dishes and did stuff on the computer. About 3:30 I got tired again so I lay down, ready to fall asleep or not, figured I had a 50-50 shot. I didn't. I didn't tense up this time, and it was kind of pleasant lying there, but I kept thinking about things I wanted to do so I got up again.
When will I go to bed tonight? There's no telling. I recently had about six months of going to bed around 10 at night and waking up around 8 in the morning. That was nice. I enjoyed it while it lasted. But it didn't last. Probably having to stay in bed to keep warm during Texas Snowmageddon signed its death warrant, but it'd been fading for awhile before that. I've also had periods that I went to bed at 8 in the morning and slept till 5 in the afternoon, and ones during which I stayed up late, slept less than four hours, and napped for 1-4 hours in the mornings, or the afternoons, or evenings, depending on when I crashed. (There is a specific "crash" sensation which absolutely requires that I lie down, whether I sleep or not. Usually I do; if I don't, at least the crash gets rested out of me. Crashes appear to be random.) When I'm really motivated I can artificially reset myself to rest at night and be relatively active during the day by staying up for 24 hours straight, until I'm so tired my entire body wants to vomit, but it doesn't last and I really do better, in the absence of outside scheduling needs, giving up on all idea of structure, lying down when I feel as if I might be able to sleep and getting up when I seem unlikely to.
It makes planning anything a bitch, though.