I haven’t been sleeping well. I don’t know when it started. I would say this week, but really that’s just been the very worst of it. I would say this year, but I wasn’t sleeping particularly well before January either. I would say since moving into a noisy city apartment, but I don’t think I was even sleeping well at home, in the burbs.
I remember one semester in college where I seemed to sleep straight through the night, every night - a solid 8 hour block of uninterrupted slumber. God, what was my secret.
On Monday, after two nights in a row of waking up at 1am and never falling back asleep, I purchased some melatonin. It worked great the first night, and now it gets me about 3 hours of sleep before I wake up again, then wait an hour, take another melatonin, and fall back asleep for 3 more hours. Not ideal, but I’ll take what I can get.
The insomnia has produced quite a collection of 3am notes app entries over the last few weeks. I find that writing helps. Sometimes they’re poorly described accounts of the weird dream I woke up from, and sometimes they’re additional thoughts on a conversation I had earlier, and sometimes they’re little rants like this one, which I actually like, so I will share.
Upon reading it again, I want to cut everything after “my jaw isn’t sitting right on my pillow,” and let it exist as a tiny little story. Like this. There. Finished piece. In Times New Roman and everything. Nice.
This week’s card is The Moon. Ruled by Pisces, The Moon describes our dreams, our fears, the unknown and the unclear, intuition, animal instinct, and emotional cycles. The yellow pathway bisecting the landscape symbolizes the truth that the only way to make peace with our fears or our emotions, is by traveling through them, or rather, allowing them to pass through us.
This card reminds me of a recurring dream I had as a kid. I was on an operating table, in a sterile, but very green and blue tinged room, and the surgeon was about to cut into my stomach using a lobster. I’m still not sure what to make of that dream, but I think it’s interesting how this imagery showed up in my subconscious years before I was actually exposed to it, or its symbolic meaning.
A sleepy Saturday to you all,
sweet dreams,
Jordan
Update as of 7:38am this morning (after writing this newsletter on Thursday): I just woke up from the best night of sleep I’ve had in probably years, likely thanks to a lot of dancing and screaming at Glass Animals last night (also very fitting for The Moon, i.e., letting your wild/animal self take over, “howl at the moon”, all that), and a perfectly shaped pillow that I will be stealing from my mom’s house. Crossing my fingers that this is the turning point in my insomnia story arc.