by: Tim Grace

You know the nights.  The ones where you want to go to bed nice and early because you’re feeling a bit drowsy after a long day of doing whatever it is you do best and then, suddenly, it hits: a severe case of being wide awake.  It’s like your body is playing some sort of cruel practical joke on you by tricking you into thinking you need sleep and then right when you think you’re going to be rewarded with dreams of sugar plum fairies or talking pumpernickels, you’re stuck with hearing everything that is happening around you.  Each footstep on the stairs penetrates your brain.  You want to kick the next person who turns on a tap or flushes the toilet.  And if you weren’t so convinced you were tired and needed sleep, you probably would.

Seeing as this happens to me more often than I’d like it to, I’ve come up with a list of things I do to help me fall asleep.

1. Read.  Whether it be your Bible or the latest Philip Yancey, or a book of Garfield comics, or perhaps your yearbooks from high school (reminiscing about the times I had in grades 9 – OAC helped me get to sleep a lot while still living at my parents’ house.)
2. Surf the Internet.  I’m a geek.  I have two computers both hooked into the InterSuperHighway in my room.  If I’m having trouble getting to sleep, I just turn one on and read through the blogs I’ve already looked at 6 times that day, check the weather for the umpteenth time, talk to random people on either of my two commonly used Instant Messenging Clients, look up random facts on Wikipedia, and the list goes on.
3. Pray.  You know, in theory, this one should be first.  I was once told by a person who lived in Lower Lehman with me my first semester that if I was having trouble getting to sleep, it was potentially because God wanted to talk with me.  As I continued on through the years, I forgot about this.  But, at the same time that I was forgetting what this person told me, I was coming to realize that prayer is something that we should do continually.  It’s a conversation with God that never ends.  We may have periods of silence, but we haven’t hung up the phone.
4. Play a game.  I can recall numerous times when I went into one of the local residence lounges and found myself playing Euchre with various people for an hour or two until I realized that it was WAY past my bed time and I wasn’t getting the sleep that the little sleep-deprived children in Michigan weren’t getting.  If you don’t use your sleep, no one else will.  Sleep’s like broccoli, right?
5. Talk with a friend.  The conversations may end up repeating themselves, or you may end up in the same place remembering what life was like in the late 80’s or early 90’s (for those who were coherent during those years, Mr. Belvedere was one of my favourite shows.)  You could also solve lots of issues, including how to successfully get your papers to write themselves.  It could happen.
6. Origami.  I made the mistake of creating three paper boats one night last January and reminding the people across the hall to allow the merchants to sail through.  600 vessels later and they’re still going
7. Write.  In high school I didn’t really like writing much.  I think it was my inability to understand literature at the depth the teachers expected from us that pushed me away from expressing my thoughts on paper.  That and every short story I wrote made no sense and the plot had about as many holes in it as the chapel roof when the snow’s melting.  But through maintaining a journal / blog online for a few years now and writing many papers for many different classes over the past 5 years, my skills have improved greatly.  Yours can too.

These are just a few examples.  But, through them, you can find yourself in a new and better place.  The place I speak of is the state of Drowsiness.  And just across the border from Drowsiness is the land where you’re the captain of the pirate ship and you’re about to marry the damsel / handsome sailor of your dreams…. That is until the alarm wakes you up the next morning.  But that’s another story all to its own.