My street is under construction, and I wake every weekday, if I am lucky, at 7 am with my house shaking, the rumbling of the trucks, and the reverse beeping of vehicles that are doing the work. I never knew that the tractors and trucks were only ever driven backwards during a job, but it is a rare reprieve to have just the rumbling of the wheels, or the squeaking of the bulldozer tracks. Even though they wait to 7 am to start, they arrive earlier, and are either used to shouting over the machinery or deaf from the years of unprotected exposure, that I hear them yelling before the machines are allowed to start up.
This is overdue, and it will end the front ditch flooding for the near future, and I am grateful for that. But for a night owl that prefers to go to bed at midnight, leaving less than 7 hours of sleep, or a shift worker that often needs to sleep in the day to make it through the nights, it is rough. It's pretty motivating to live within the time constraints they set, but this week they are working ten-eleven hour days, leaving very little peace left in the day.
So last night, after a few nights of less than seven hours sleep, I determined to go to bed "ridiculously early" at 22:30. Then I woke up at 3:15, very aware of the irony of having the peace to sleep, but the pressure to sleep lead to insomnia. As the hours passes, the impending inevitability of the construction crew's arrival at 7 grew.
At 4:30, the first birds started chirping. Soon after five, the sun rose, spilling light around the blinds, and intensifying the frustration of sleep. By now I had unblocked multiple apps on my phone in order to override the screen time refusals programmed from 23-7 am. I solved a daily puzzle, checked my work schedule, wrote an overdue email, caught up on facebook.
I sleepily pawed through my bedside table to find a complimentary gift of an eyecover from Air Canada; a remnant of heady days of travel, and found the room black. It was 6:30 now, but it was only after the first earthquakes started that I was able to fall asleep, half tuned to wake if Princess Pirate was. The next hour of sleep should have been terrible, but it was just what I needed.
Like most anxiety, insomnia is worse for the disproportion of reality. The dread is worse than the disease, or, in this case, the disease itself.
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