I’ve recently noticed that there are numerous old songs that deal with loneliness in the middle of the night; and, my guess is that more than a few of them were composed during the hours when “the whole wide world is fast asleep.”  After all, there wasn’t much else to do.  Ripped from dreamland where your mind’s eye took you through unimaginable journeys and thrown back in the world of consciousness.  You.  Alone.  Awake.  No 24 hour grocery store or coffee shop back then.  No Twitter feeds to read or shows to binge watch.  No emails to check or apps to play games.

Imagine how insomnia must have played out before all today’s technology came to pass – before social media, before the internet, before cable television?  Today’s insomnia sufferers cannot only amuse our minds with cheesy infomercials (worst case scenario) but scour the internet for incredibly lame information we didn’t really need to know at 4am.  And, miracle of miracles, we can even locate via Facebook everyone else that is suffering from insomnia in our wide circle of friends.

We are not alone.

Doesn’t mean we’ve made anything better.  We’ve just created a whole new set of problems for ourselves when we realize that we are awake in the middle of the night.

You know the feeling, groggily at first, you peer through the darkness at the alarm clock, expecting to see it reads just a few minutes before the alarm would go off anyway…but, no.  It’s 4am.  The initial joy that you might have a few more hours to sleep, quickly turns to anxiety as you stare back at the clock.  4:09.  4:17.  4:21.  The thoughts of the day are already turning and brewing throughout your brain as if you’ve been up for hours.

Did I word that email on the latest work project in the best possible way?  Should I have said something different to my boss when he asked me about my co-worker?  Maybe I can reschedule our staff meeting for Thursday so we can order Chipotle for lunch?  Ugh, I’m awake; now what?

Perhaps you are a denier, refusing to give in to the fact that you are actually conscious.  You lie there in the dark, as motionless as possible, and empty your mind.  You know your body is still getting the recoup time needed and you are resolute in staying still and silent.  You will probably fall back asleep because you are determined to make it so.  This isn’t me.

Perhaps you are a treater, drinking warm milk, taking a swig of Nyquil, counting sheep, tossing back a shot of whiskey with your Melatonin…whatever you think might work.

Perhaps you are an acceptor, deciding to jump out of bed with a smile on your face and start your day.  After all, that’s a few more hours of productivity that weren’t there before.  I try to do this but it doesn’t usually work, so I end up falling into the next, and likely most popular, category.

The irresolute.  The vacillator.  The shilly-shally.  Refusing to throw in the towel on either side, we wait for a little while and then wait a little more.  We don’t quite get up, but we don’t lie without distraction.  We can’t even decide on what method might work for us, so we don’t treat the issue either.  We find an activity that falls in between the acceptors and the deniers – here’s where that technology comes in.  And, for a moment it’s not so bad.  We can stay semi-relaxed in our nice cozy bed, while putting our brain to work on a mindless task like searching for cat videos on youtube, scrolling through a high school friend’s vacation photos on social media, or re-watching old CSI reruns from the DVR.  Technology has given us these gratuitous gifts that allow us to wait in a semi-trance like state.  Wait to be tired again and wait to fall back asleep.

And that is where the problem lies.  We are now on the precipice of falling back asleep; but, it is merely minutes before the alarm is scheduled to go off for real.  So, now, we are actually feeling more exhausted than if we would have just gotten up in the first place or had more patience to lie there in the dark without distraction.  We’ve done it to ourselves and can now only curse our insomnia a second time.

On occasion it can ruin your entire day.  Yawning, zoning out…waiting for the day to conclude.  Perhaps trying to cure the need for a nap by hiding the feeling under a few layers of caffeine.  And, when it happens during standard time when you are driving home in the dark at 6pm, all you want to do is head back home, put on your pajamas and lay on the couch (or even better get into bed), which is the only true remedy to heal this “I shouldn’t have turned on my phone/iPad/television this morning” fuzzy trance-like state.  When you finally head back to sleep at day’s end, perchance you remind yourself of what happened before the sun came up to start the day and vow that if it happens again tonight, you won’t be tempted to become a middle of the night technology zombie.  I won’t do it.  I won’t do it.

Or, you wake up a few hours later, look at the clock and start thinking…”Four in the Morning”, wasn’t that a Night Ranger song?  Gosh, there are a lot of old songs about the middle of the night.  I think I’ll look some up on the internet until I get tired again.  #50WeeksTo50