insomnia is no match for a good imagination

In periods of stress and anxiety, I always get insomnia. It's enough to drive me nuts, simply because facing anxiety and stress alone are difficult let alone doing it while exhausted. What you might struggle to deal with today, I can pretty much assure you that if you stay up half the night, today will feel like wonderland compared to tomorrow. Sleep is essential for health- mind, body and soul.

When you've spent nights awake till two and then up at six, the darkness seems deeper and darker and reaches too far to see the edge of. Loneliness is sharper, what you are afraid will happen seems so much more likely. When it's two am, and everyone is asleep and the house and everything around you is silent, isolation is at it's peak. Solutions to problems are tucked away somewhere, out of sight and hidden. Mentally, you spin around and around and around, lighting for a moment on a thought and then skipping away again when it stings. When you're that tired, and that stressed, everything stings. Happy thoughts belong to the day, not to the people sitting alone in the dark.

On these nights, I try to banish the fear, or sadness or stress with happy thoughts. Something so happy, so beautiful that the darkness can't break in. Since I was very young, I've gone to the same mental place when even the relief of sleep is hard to hold on to. My little personal cure for insomnia.

I curl up in bed and close my eyes and I imagine something I will never ever have, but something that is so perfect, the image is enough.

I imagine my mother running in the sun catching butterflies with my daughter. I can see the expression on her face as they jump through the sprinkler, flashing in and out of the little rainbows. I imagine us, mom and the girls and I, swinging on the swings feet pointed to the sun. I imagine us jumping in puddles in the rain and looking for worms and other icky's. I see us all sitting on a log by the creek eating ice cream. Walking down the trails in the snow, sliding down hills with rosey cheeks. In my imagination, she does not limp or hurt. We swim in the summer, and slide in the winter. We rake leaves and jump in the piles in the fall, we go on hikes and look for all the baby snapping turtles so faith can be like Diego and help them find their way to their mothers in the water. We skip and run and laugh and play, and she's always laughing and smiling.

Even though I know I will never have these things, imagining what it would be like if I COULD...it is enough to make me happy and relaxed enough to sleep. Truth be told, I do not do this only when I can't sleep. Every night I am not sleeping before I've touched my pillow, I spend a little bit of time in that other world where my mom gets to be the person she would have been.

To you it sounds morbid maybe, but to me...it's perfect.